The Age of Radiance Read Online Free Page A

known incidents of phosphorescence and luminescence began with an external source of illumination. Instead, the rays of uranium emitted all on their own accord. Unlike what everyone had known so far about the boundaries of the material world, Becquerel’s accident revealed matter creating energy through its own volition: “Its luminosity came from within.” He had discovered light that comes from a stone, and called it les rayons uraniques —“uranic rays.”
    Despite this earthshaking revelation, scientists at the time continued studying Röntgen rays instead of uranics—which, after all, did not dramatically reveal skeletons—but that lack of broad interest appealed to a Sorbonne graduate student looking for a topic for a doctorate in 1897, as this meant there was no lengthy history of journal scholarship to research, and the properties of uranic rays could immediately be investigated firsthand in the lab. This academic “shortcut” led to six years of backbreaking toil and a discovery that would revolutionize the science of physics, as well as the stature of women in the world.

    W hen they were teenagers together in Warsaw, Bronya Skłodowska ( Squaw-DOFF-ska ) made a pact with her littlest sister, Manya. If Bronya was accepted to medical school in Paris, Manya would work two years to support her; then if Manya was accepted to the university, she would be supported in turn. As Polish women were forbidden from anything approaching higher education in the czarist Russian colony of that time, though, they first attended the Floating University—“we agreed among ourselves to give evening courses, each one teaching what he knew best,” as Manya described it. This illicit underground educational collective got its name from the fact that its classes met in changing locations, the better to evade the eyes of imperial authorities and local snitches, and its students’ lofty goal went far beyond mere self-improvement. They hoped their grassroots educational movement would raise the likelihood of eventual Polish liberation, and many followed the “positivist” philosophy of Auguste Comte, which promoted a scientific method for understanding both human affairs and the universe. Even to this day in the Polish tongue, a positivist is a pragmatist, accepting of people as they are and the world as it is.
    From the example of the Skłodowskas, the Floating University was exemplary in educating its brave students. Bronya was indeed accepted to medical school at the Sorbonne in Paris, and Manya, as promised, began work as a nanny, first in Kraków with a family whom she unreservedly despised, telling her cousin Henrietta on December 10, 1885,“My existence has been that of a prisoner [working for] a family of lawyers [who] when there is company speak a chimney-sweeper’s kind of French. . . . I shouldn’t like my worst enemy to live in such a hell. . . . They are sunk in the darkest stupidity. . . . I learned to know the human race a little better by being there. I learned that the characters described in novels really do exist, and that one must not enter into contact with people who have been corrupted by wealth.”
    Manya was then hired by the Zorawskis, the managers of a sugar-beet plantation north of Warsaw. The family house was stucco, with a pleasure garden, a croquet lawn, forty horses, and sixty cows, adjacent to the immense brick sugar-beet factory, which processed the bounty of two hundred acres, continually arriving in a stream of oxen carts, and discharged into the river a “dark, sticky scum.” Her charges on the estate included Bronka, eighteen; Andzia, ten; Stas, three; and Maryshna, six months. Manya wrote Henrietta that“Stas is very funny. His nyanya told him God was everywhere. And he, with his little face agonized, asked: ‘Is he going to catch me? Will he biteme?’ . . . I ought to think myself very lucky.” Manya and Bronka, with the parents’ assent, spent two hours a day