Einstein's Letter to Marie Curie (1911)
einsteinpapers.press.princeton.edu
einsteinpapers.press.princeton.edu
* Born in obscurity in Poland, she didn't have money for studies. Her sister and her made a pact where one worked as a governess so the other could study. She eventually made it to the University of Paris, at a time when Oxford and Cambridge were closed to women.
* She won TWO Nobel prizes!
* She poisoned herself by exposing herself to x-rays (unwittingly) in mobile x-ray units for the French Army in WW1
* Her affair with the married Langevin drove his jealous wife to steal their incriminating letters, which she then released to the press. It was an amazing scandal, which is what Einstien is referring to here. She was denounced as a Polish foreigner.
There was an amazing documentary on Nova (I believe) but can't seem to find it online.
[Edit] - found it!
http://www.aip.org/history/curie/scandal1.htm
Pierre Curie died in 1906 and she became romantically involved with Paul Langevin, a former student of Pierre, in 1910. At the time it was considered gauche for a widow of her age (she was 38 at the time of Pierre's death) to remarry. But what really ignited the ire of the press was mostly the fact that Langevin was already married, though estranged from his wife.
And then comes the P.S.:
I have determined the statistical law of motion of the
diatomic molecule in Planck's radiation field [...]
It's a pretty amusing way for Einstein to describe his derivation, anyway.
I thought it was just Einstein writing extremely strained English. If the original reads fluidly, then the translation...could use improvement. It's comically strained.
My father said that when he was a kid in the 1960s, there was still a sense in the U.S. that it would be useful to learn some German if you planned to go into fields like math or physics.
But I wonder how European scientists at the time of this letter chose what language to use in their personal correspondence.
That doesn't qualify as "quickly married his husband's assistant" at all, and they were never even married.
http://einsteinpapers.press.princeton.edu/vol5-trans/249
(It's the section beginning "I have little that is new to report in physics".)
Gosh, I am dummy.
So it's not all bad.
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
At least that's how I interpret Vinhboy's comment.