A prismatic look at the meeting of Marie Curie and Albert Einstein and the impact these two pillars of science had on eachother's life and work.
In 1911, some of the greatest minds in science convened at the First Solvay Conference in Physics, a meeting like no other. Almost half of the attendees had won or would go on to win the Nobel Prize. Over the course of those few days, these minds began to realize that classical physics was about to give way to quantum mechanics, a seismic shift in our history and how we understand not just our world, but the universe.

At the center of this meeting were Marie Curie and a young Albert Einstein. In the years preceding, Curie had faced the death ofher husband and intellectual soul mate, Pierre. She was on the cusp of being awarded her second Nobel Prize, but scandal erupted all around her when the French press revealed that she was having an affair with a fellow scientist, Paul Langvin.

The subject of vicious...