情色书屋

Chapter II Dream in His Youth
书名： 居里夫人自传（名人传记系列） 作者： [法]居里(Curie,M.) 本章字数： 12062 更新时间： 2020-07-30 15:56:20

ierre Curie was still very young when he began his higher studies in preparation for the licentiate in physics. He followed the lectures and laboratory work at the Sorbonne and had, besides, access to the laboratory of Professor Leroux in the School of Pharmacy, where he assisted in the preparation of the physics courses. At the same time he became further acquainted with laboratory methods by working with his brother Jacques, who was then teaching assistant of chemistry courses under Riche and Jungfleisch.

Pierre received his licentiate in physical sciences at the age of eighteen. During his studies he had attracted the attention of Desains, director of the University laboratory, and of Mouton, assistant director of the same laboratory. Thanks to their appreciation he was appointed, when only nineteen years old, teaching assistant for Desains and placed in charge of the students’ laboratory work in physics. He held this position five years, and it was during this time that he began his experimental research.

It is to be regretted that because of his financial situation Pierre was obliged, at this early age of nineteen, to accept the post of teaching assistant instead of being able to give his whole time for two or three years longer to his University studies. With his time thus absorbed by his professional duties and his investigations he had to give up following the lectures in higher mathematics, and he therefore passed no further examinations. In compensation, however, he was released from military service in conformity with the privileges at that time accorded young men who undertook to serve as teachers in the public-school system.

He was by this time a tall and slender young man with chestnut-colored hair and a shy and reserved expression. At the same time his youthful face mirrored a profound inner life. One has such an impression of him as he appears in a good group photograph of Doctor Curie’s family. His head is resting on his hand in a pose of abstraction and reverie, and one cannot but be struck by the expression of the large, limpid eyes that seem to be following some inner vision. Beside him the brownhaired brother offers a striking contrast, his vivacious eyes and whole appearance suggesting decision.

The two brothers loved each other tenderly and lived as good comrades, being accustomed to work together in the laboratory and walk together in their free hours. They also kept up affectionate relations with a few of their childhood friends: Louis Depouilly, their cousin, who became a physician; Louis Vauthier, also later a physician; and Albert Bazille, who became an engineer in the post and telegraph service.

Pierre used to tell me of the vivid memories he had of the vacations passed at Draveil on the Seine, where, with his brother Jacques, he took long walks beside the river, agreeably interrupted by swimming and diving in the stream. Both brothers were excellent swimmers. Sometimes they tramped for entire days. They had, at an early age, acquired the habit of visiting the suburbs of Paris on foot. At times also Pierre made solitary excursions which well suited his meditative spirit. On these occasions he lost all sense of time, and went to the extreme limit of his physical forces. Absorbed in delightful contemplation of the things about him, he was not conscious of material difficulties.

On the pages of a diary written in 1879, he thus expressed the salutary influence of the country upon him:”Oh, what a good time I have passed there in that gracious solitude, so far from the thousand little worrying things that torment me in Paris. No, I do not regret my nights passed in the woods, and my solitary days. If I had the time I would let myself recount all my musings. I would also describe my delicious valley, filled with the perfume of aromatic plants, the beautiful mass of foliage, so fresh and so humid, that hung over the Bievre, the fairy palace with its colonnades of hops, the stony hills, red with heather, where it was so good to be. Oh, I shall remember always with gratitude the forest of the Miniere; of all the woods I have seen, it is this one that I have loved most and where I have been happiest. Often in the evening I would start out and ascend again this valley, and I would return with twenty ideas in my head.”Thus, for Pierre Curie, the sensation of well-being he experienced in the country was derived from the opportunity for tranquil reflection. Daily life in Paris with its numerous interruptions did not permit of undisturbed concentration, and this was to him a cause of inquietude and suffering. He felt himself destined for scientific research; for him the necessity was imperative of comprehending the phenomena of Nature in order to form a satisfactory theory to explain them. But when trying to fix his mind on some problem he had frequently to turn aside because of the multiplicity of futile things that disturbed his reflections and plunged him into discouragement.

Under the heading, “A day like too many others”, he enumerated in his diary a list of the puerile happenings that had completely filled one of his days, leaving no time for useful work. He then concluded: “There is my day, and I have accomplished nothing. Why?” Further on he returned to the same theme under a title borrowed from Victor Hugo’s “Le Roi S’Amuse” :

“To deafen with little bells the spirit that would think””In order that, weak one that I am, I shall not let my head turn with all the winds, yielding to the least breath that touches it, it is necessary that all should be immobile about me, or that, like a spinning top, movement alone should render me insensible to external objects. “”When, in the process of turning slowly upon myself, I try to gain momentum, a nothing, a word, a story, a paper, a visit stops me and is able to put off or retard forever the moment when, granted a sufficient swiftness I might have, in spite of my surroundings, concentrated on my own intention… We must eat, drink, sleep, be idle, love, touch the sweetest things of life and yet not succumb to them. It is necessary that, in doing all this, the higher thoughts to which one is dedicated remain dominant and continue their unmoved course in our poor heads. It is necessary to make a dream of life, and to make of a dream a reality.”

This acute analysis, sufficiently surprising in a young man of twenty years, suggests in an admirable manner the conditions necessary to the highest manifestations of the intellect. It carries a lesson which, if it were sufficiently understood, would facilitate the way of all contemplative spirits capable of opening new paths for humanity.

The unity of thought toward which Pierre Curie strove was troubled not only by professional and social obligations but also by his tastes, which urged him towards a broad literary and artistic culture. Like his father, he loved reading, and did not fear to undertake arduous literary tasks. To some criticism made in this connection, he responded readily: “I do not dislike tedious books.” This meant that he was fascinated by the search after truth which was sometimes associated with writing devoid of charm. He also loved painting and music, and went gladly to look at pictures or to attend a concert. A few fragments of poetry in his handwriting were left among his papers.

But all these preoccupations were subordinated in his mind to what he considered his true task, and when his scientific imagination was not in full activity, he felt himself, in a sense, an incomplete being. He expressed this inquietude with an emotion born of his suffering during momentary periods of depression. “What shall I become?” he wrote. “Very rarely have I command of all myself; ordinarily a part of me sleeps. My poor spirit, are you then so weak that you cannot control my body? Oh, my thoughts, you count indeed for very little! I should have the greatest confidence in the power of my imagination to pull me out of the rut, but I greatly fear that my imagination is dead.”But despite hesitations, doubts, and lost moments, the young man was little by little striking out his path and strengthening his will. He was resolutely carrying on fruitful investigations at an age when many men who were to become savants were as yet only pupils.

His first work, done in collaboration with Desains, concerned the determination of the lengths of heat waves with the aid of a thermo-electric element and a metallicwire grating, a process, then entirely new, which has since often been employed in the study of this question.

Following this he undertook an investigation on crystals in collaboration with his brother, who had passed his licentiate and was teaching assistant for Friedel in the laboratory of mineralogy at the Sorbonne. Their experiments led the two young physicists to a great success: the discovery of the hitherto unknown phenomena of piezo-electricity, which consists of an electric polarization produced by the compression or the expansion of crystals in the direction of the axis of symmetry. This was by no means a chance discovery. It was the result of much reflection on the symmetry of crystalline matter, which enabled the brothers to foresee the possibilities of such polarization. The first part of the investigation was made in Friedel’s laboratory. With an experimental skill rare at their age, the young men succeeded in making a complete study of the new phenomenon, established the conditions of symmetry necessary to its production in crystals, and stated its remarkably simple quantitative laws, as well as its absolute magnitude for certain crystals. Several wellknown scientists of other nations (Roentgen, Kundt, Voigt, Riecke) have made further investigations along this new road opened by Jacques and Pierre Curie.

The second part of the work, and much more difficult to realize experimentally, concerned the compression resulting in piezo-electric crystals when they were exposed to the action of an electric field. This phenomenon, foreseen by Lippmann, was demonstrated by the Curie brothers. The difficulty of the experiment lay in the minuteness of the deformations that had to be observed. Fortunately Desains and Mouton placed a small room adjoining the physics laboratory at the disposal of the brothers so that they might proceed successfully with their delicate operations.

From these researches, as much theoretical as experimental, they immediately deduced a practical application, in the form of a new apparatus, a piezo-electric quartz electrometer, which measures in absolute terms small quantities of electricity, as well as electric currents of low intensity. This apparatus has since then rendered great service in experiments in radioactivity.

During the course of their experiments on piezo-electricity the Curies were obliged to employ electrometric apparatus, and, not being able to use the quadrant electrometer known at that time, they developed a new form of that instrument, better adapted to their necessities. This became known in France as the Curie electrometer. Thus these years of collaboration between the two brothers, always intimately united, proved both happy and fruitful. Their devotion and their common interest in science were to them both a stimulant and a support. During their work the vivacity and energy of Jacques were of precious aid to Pierre, always more easily absorbed by his thoughts.

However, this beautiful and close collaboration lasted only a few years. In 1883, Pierre and Jacques were obliged to separate; Jacques left for the University of Montpelier as Head Lecturer in Mineralogy. Pierre was made Director of Laboratory Work in the School of Industrial Physics and Chemistry founded by the city of Paris at the suggestion of Friedel and of Schutzenberger, who became its first director.

Their remarkable researches with crystals won for the brothers in 1895—very late, it was true—the Plante prize.

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