The Age of Radiance Read Online Free PDF Page B

the following year. Then a miraculous stroke of luck came her way: the same friend who’d defended her on the streets with an umbrella got her awarded the Alexandrovitch scholarship—six hundred rubles—enough for over a year of living expenses. She was saved. The following year, she was awarded her master’s in mathematics, and by then, she spoke perfect French with a bare whisper of Polish flavor. In a few years’ time, she would have her first paid assignment, and out of those fees she would repay, for the first time in its history, the scholarship, so another impoverished student could be given help when it was most needed.
    Before completing the math degree, she was commissioned by the Society for the Encouragement of National Industry to do a study aligning the magnetic properties of different steels to their chemical compositions. She needed to find a lab where she could do this work, and a friend she’d met while working for the Zorawskis knew someone who might have a room, a teacher at the École Supérieure de Physique et de Chimie Industrielles de la Ville (the city’s industrial engineering and chemistry school). Additionally, this friend of a friend of a friend had a number of remarkable similarities to Marie. She was investigating the magnetic properties of steel, and this city schoolteacher had discovered a remarkable interaction of heat and magnetism; Marie was educated outside any state system through the Floating University and her program of self-education while working as a governess, while Pierre had been homeschooled by his parents, his brother, and a tutor before qualifying to enter the Sorbonne. They were both workaholics, with his family nearly as well educated and as financially precarious as the Skłodowskas. And they were both outsiders in the French scientific community,who expected their members to have a Polytechnique education like the Becquerels.
    Marie:“Pierre’s intellectual capacities were not those which would permit the rapid assimilation of a prescribed course of studies. His dreamer’s spirit would not submit itself to the ordering of the intellectual effort imposed by the school. . . . He grew up in all freedom, developing his taste for natural science through his excursions into the country, where he collected plants and animals for his father.” Pierre:“I did not regret my nights passed in the woods, and my solitary days. If I had the time I would let myself recount my musings. I would describe my delicious valley, filled with the perfume of aromatic plants, the beautiful mass of foliage, so fresh and so humid, that hung over the Bievre, the fairy palace with its colonnade of hops, the stony hills, red with heather. . . . We must eat, sleep, be idle, have sex, love, touch the sweetest things in life and yet not succumb to them.”
    Pierre Curie had fallen in love as a young man, but then the girl died, and a lack of income forced him to put off work toward his doctorate indefinitely. Instead, he became a poorly paid laboratory instructor at the city school; at the age of thirty-five, he was still living with his parents. Working with elder brother Jacques, Pierre studied crystals—quartz, tourmaline, topaz, sugar—and found that, when they were compressed along the axis of symmetry, they produced a charge—piezoelectricity (from the Greek, “to squeeze”). For the precise measurements needed for this work, the physicist brothers created a highly sensitive instrument that combined tiny weights, microscopic meter readers, and pneumatic dampeners—the Curie scale. Then, heating various materials to 1,400°C (over 2,500°F), they discovered a link between heat and magnetism. Today the temperature that a given element loses its magnetism, the Curie point, is used in studying plate tectonics, treating hypothermia, measuring the caffeine in beverages, and understanding extraterrestrial magnetic fields, while piezoelectricity is found in mechanisms propelling the