The Elements of Marie Curie:
How the Glow of Radium Lit a Path for Women in Science
DAVA SOBEL
FOURTH ESTATE, 336 PP, £22
TABLET BOOKSHOP PRICE £19.80 • TEL 020 7799 4064
HENRY ADAMS described Marie Curie’s discovery of radium as a “metaphysical bomb”, and so it was. Radioactivity meant that the God-given fixity of the elements was an illusion. In time, some of the most shining of them, so neatly set out or predicted in Mendeleev’s Periodic Table, would transmute back to lead. When Ernest Rutherford, who played a hand in the unfolding of the story, as Henri Becquerel had in its prelude, heard “transmutation” being used in scientific conversation, he begged colleagues to stop, lest the public believe that science was reverting to alchemy and magic.
