My Amazon Review of Jeffrey Orens' "The Soul of Genius: Marie Curie, Albert Einstein......."

 

The Rise of the New Physics

 

In 1911 Ernest Solvay the founder of Solvay S.A., then the largest chemical company in the world as a result of its new soda ash process, convened a conference of the world’s leading physicists in Brussels. Solvay was long interested in physics and theorized that energy and mass were inter-related. The idea of the conference came from German physicist Walter Nernst and it continues to this day at three year intervals with the 1927 conference being the most memorable for for its contents and participants.

 

In this book retired Solvay chemical engineer/manager Jeffrey Orens tells the story of the conference and its attendees, most notably Marie Curie and Albert Einstein. The purpose of the conference was to deal with the failure of classical physics to deal with the new world of quantum mechanics. To Orens the conference was Einstein’s coming out party because although his four path breaking papers came out in 1905, few scientists actually knew him personally. Thus, it was in Brussels where the scientific community recognized his true genius and he was soon off to a high post in Berlin, not bad for a lowly patent clerk in Bern.

 

Orens spends a good part of his book on the life of Marie Curie and how as a Polish émigré in Paris she would go on to win Nobel Prizes in physics in chemistry. The former for the discovery of radiation and the latter for isolating radium. She puts up with the rankest of sexism as the French scientific establishment fails to accept that women can do science.

 

The sexism comes to its head during the Solvay Conference where Curie is accused of having an affair her longtime married colleague Paul Langevin. Had she been a man, far from the affair being on the front pages of the tabloids, it would have largely been unnoticed. The couple loved each other, but it wasn’t to be. However, their grandchildren would later marry.

 

For a chemical engineer Orens tells a good story and it is worthy entry to the history of science.

For the full Amazon URL see: The Rise of the New Physics (amazon.com)