05/03/2021
Orens, a former executive at Solvay Chemical, over-promises and under-delivers in his debut, a look at the first Solvay Conference in which “the most brilliant scientific minds” came together. Organized in 1911 by Ernest Solvay, the conference was designed to bring a handful of the world’s leading physicists together to discuss the breakthroughs roiling the field. While both Marie Curie and Albert Einstein attended, they had only brief interactions at the meeting, and Orens fails to present evidence that the conference “changed the course of science.” Instead, he offers biographical snippets of Curie, Einstein, and Solvay that provide little insight beyond what has already been written about them by others, and the thumbnail portraits can be frustratingly repetitive; the fact that Solvay didn’t attend college because of medical issues and was self-taught, for example, is brought up seven times. While there are some entertaining tangents (such as discussions of the theft of the Mona Lisa and a brief history of the bubonic plague), they’re mostly irrelevant to the unproved notion that Curie and Einstein influenced the scientific ideas of each other. Readers interested in the history of physics or the lives of its luminaries will be better served elsewhere. (July)
"Einstein's often-forgotten links to the empirically minded Marie Curie receive highly illuminating scrutiny from a researcher affiliated with the Solvay Institutes, sponsor of the 1911 conference in Brussels that brought these two brilliant minds together. Readers share in the intellectual ferment of this singular conference, and Orens recounts how these two pioneers won each other’s admiration for their complementary roles in forging a twentieth-century physics. The narrative teaches readers a great deal about the scientific research of Einstein and Curie; however, it also probes the tangled romantic lives of both scientists. A compellingportrait of two geniuses, remarkable for their conceptual daring and emotional complexity."
Jeffery Orens’ insightful work exploits the Age of Information as a marvelous time for deep research, uncovered details, unexpected cross-connections, and scandalous gossip. The Soul of Genius is a new examination of how the Solvay Conferences of Physics, beginning in 1911, brought together people who would turn science upside down and change our view of reality. Two participants, Marie Curie and Albert Einstein, were key influencers in this revolution, and Orens’ analysis of their collision at Solvay is thorough and revealing. Read all about it, and soak yourself in the details.
Toward the end of his life, when asked which physicist he most respected, Albert Einstein replied ‘Hendrik Lorentz and Marie Curie.’ At the momentous inaugural Solvay conference,Einstein, the meeting’s youngest participant, was dazzled by the ‘sparkling intelligence’ of Curie, and she was impressed with him, too, and soon afterward gave him a glowing reference that helped to secure his first professorship. Vivid. [Upon Curie’s death,] Einstein’s tribute to her life gives some of the most compelling evidence of the closeness of their friendship and the depth of his admiration for her. A rewarding read.
“The Soul of Genius is the engaging story of science at a crossroads, a telling of how the world was transformed from the long-held ideas of Newton to those of Einstein and Curie that define modern physics. Deeply researched and masterfully told, The Soul of Genius is a ground-breaking book that delves deep into the story of how an ‘assembly of genius’ led to how we perceive the physical world today.”
Imagine you could gather the world’s most brilliant minds to debate the fundamental nature of reality – this was the opportunity seized a century ago by the Belgian industrialist Ernest Solvay, wrangling Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, and a mountain of Nobel Prize winners to solve the mysteries of quantum physics. The Soul of Genius takes us through these epochal Solvay Conferences, focusing on the scientific ideas and personal lives of Curie and Einstein. In compelling stories, we see how they changed the world against a backdrop featuring the Mona Lisa, a fair bit of swordplay, and a world war. A marvelous tale of how science actually works.
Curie’s first Nobel Prize had been for the physics of radioactivity; her second would be for the chemistry of radium. It coincided with a further crisis that forms a major part of Jeffrey Orens’s The Soul of Genius, [along with] the historic conference that is the central event of Oren’s book. The The First Solvay Conference has gone down as a landmark event, the start of a series that continues to the present day. The story of Curie’s love affair had broken just as the conference was ending. Then, only a few days later, came the announcement that Marie was to be awarded the Nobel Prize for chemistry. She was at the eye of a media storm. Curie was due to receive her second Nobel the following month, and the committee was nervous. Curie replied, ‘I consider that there is no relation between my scientific work and the facts of private life.’ On Dec. 10, she went to Stockholm and received her award. By the end of the month she was seriously ill and in a hospital. ‘She had paid a tremendous cost for being a woman of principle,’ Mr. Orens writes. ‘It was a price that would never be fully recovered.’
Orens’s approach to the lives and works of the attendees, through the story of this conference, is unusual and well-conceived. The Soul of Genius revisits what is certainly one of the most exciting, turbulent periods in the history of science and better acquaints us with people who played significant roles in this drama."
2021-05-15
Dual biography of “the two brilliant individuals who have made the greatest impression on people across the world when they think of science.”
The meeting was the iconic first 1911 Solvay Conference in Brussels, attended by many geniuses besides the two in the title. Orens, a former engineer and executive with Solvay Chemical, presents portraits of Einstein and Curie that will not replace a focused individual life—see Walter Isaacson’s Einstein (2007) and Susan Quinn’s Marie Curie (1995)—but it’s a good read. Ernest Solvay (1838-1922) was a wealthy Belgian industrialist who, like Alfred Nobel, his contemporary, became a philanthropist for scientific causes. Still held every three years, Solvay conferences assemble elite physicists and chemists to discuss a significant problem. Einstein and Curie met at the first and remained friends, although their research never overlapped. As such, Orens skips back and forth as he recounts their lives. Not yet a scientific superstar, Einstein was a central figure at the 1911 meeting, the goal of which was to explain newly discovered quantum phenomena that didn’t make sense. His epic 1905 papers are mostly known for proposing relativity, but one explained that an electron could behave as a particle and energy wave at the same time. A groundbreaking discovery at the birth of quantum mechanics, this “photoelectric effect” (not relativity) won Einstein his Nobel Prize. It was among the first proven phenomena to contradict Newton’s laws, and scientists are still trying to reconcile these quantum effects and classical physics. Curie discovered radium, by far the most radioactive element. Although she didn’t discover radioactivity (a common error), she explained it as a consequence of a breakdown of the atom itself—not, as some theorized, a sort of chemical reaction. Fiercely dedicated, ambitious, and workaholic, she overcame poverty and the almost universal prejudice against educated women to became the first internationally famous woman scientist.
A painless introduction to two of the 20th century’s greatest geniuses.
