In 1903 Pierre Curie (1859–1906) and Marie Curie (1867–1934), together with Henri Becquerel, received the Nobel Prize in Physics – for the discovery of radioactivity. Two years later, from the summer of 1905, both attended in Paris a series of sittings with the Italian physical medium Eusapia Palladino. Pierre was actively involved for months and wrote in a now-famous letter that "a whole new domain of facts" was opening up here. On 19 April 1906 he died from a traffic accident on the Rue Dauphine. Marie continued for a while afterwards, then withdrew. The Curie–Palladino episode is one of the most unusual and least-told chapters in the history of modern atomic physics.
Eusapia Palladino
Eusapia Maria Carolina Palladino (1854–1918) was born in Minervino Murge in Apulia, lost her parents early and remained illiterate for her whole life. From the 1880s onwards her trance sittings with physical phenomena became known: tables that lifted of their own accord, "rapping" sounds with no apparent source, touches from invisible hands, and occasionally semi-materialisations of human hand and face features.
Palladino was investigated over the course of her life by a series of scientific commissions: in 1888 by Cesare Lombroso in Naples, in 1892 by the Milan commission (Lombroso, the astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli, Carl du Prel, Alexander Aksakov and others), in 1895 by the Society for Psychical Research in Cambridge, in 1908 by an SPR commission in Naples (Carrington, Feilding, Baggally) and in 1909/10 in New York. The record is – honestly – contradictory. She was caught cheating several times when controls were loose (manipulation with a free foot, small tricks with the curtain). On the other hand, the same investigators noted under strict controls phenomena they could not explain. She is therefore neither a clear case of fraud nor a "pure" medium, but a methodologically very complicated historical datum.
The Paris investigation circle at the Institut Général Psychologique
At the beginning of the 20th century, Paris was one of the most scientifically active cities in Europe for the investigation of mediumistic phenomena. The driving force was the physiologist and later Nobel laureate (Medicine, 1913) Charles Richet, who would coin the term "ectoplasm". Together with the astronomers Camille Flammarion and Jacques Bergonié, and with the Curies, Richet organised from June 1905 onwards a series of sittings with Palladino at the Institut Général Psychologique (IGP) on the Avenue de l'Observatoire.
Over the following three years at least 43 sittings took place, the bulk of them before Pierre Curie's death. The experimental protocol was unusually strict for the time: Palladino was simultaneously controlled at hands and feet by two investigators, her movements were noted, and photographic documentation was often used. The final IGP report appeared in 1908 in the institute's bulletin and described the findings cautiously but without dismissal: part of the phenomena could not be explained conventionally.
Pierre Curie's active role
Pierre Curie was not a passive observer but a co-experimenter. He designed control mechanisms, documented the sittings in detail, and discussed methodological questions with Richet. In his letters to his closest friend, the physicist Louis Georges Gouy, both his growing fascination and his growing concerns can be followed in parallel.
The most famous of these letters is from 24 July 1905. Pierre writes, after several sittings with Palladino:
"There is here, in my opinion, a whole new domain of facts and physical states of space of which we have no conception."
— Pierre Curie to Louis Georges Gouy, 24 July 1905 (French original: "Il y a là, à mon avis, tout un domaine de faits et d'états physiques de l'espace dont nous n'avons aucune notion.")
This sentence is methodologically more precise than it appears at first reading. Pierre does not speak of "spirits". He speaks of physical states of space – that is, a possible, still unknown physical phenomenon. Exactly the same position appears decades later in Albert Einstein: "If the data hold, we need an extended physics."
Marie Curie as a participant
Marie Curie was less often present than her husband, but she was present. She is mentioned several times in the sitting protocols, once even as the direct hand-controller of Palladino. Her own position was more reserved than Pierre's from the beginning. As an experimental physicist she was shaped by the radical methodological strictness that the work on radioactivity required – she saw very clearly how hard Palladino's conditions were to control.
Pierre's death in 1906 – the investigation is interrupted
On the afternoon of 19 April 1906, Pierre Curie was crossing the Rue Dauphine in the 6th arrondissement of Paris in pouring rain, slipped, and fell between the wheels of a heavy two-horse wagon carrying military equipment. The rear wheel crushed his skull. He was 46 years old.
Only five days before his death, on 14 April 1906, Pierre had written another letter to Gouy in which he summarised the Palladino work – more soberly than in 1905, with clear references to contradictions in the data, but still planning a systematic publication. That publication was never written. With his death the Paris line of investigation collapsed. Richet continued the sittings, but without the physical heavyweight Pierre Curie.
Marie Curie's later distancing
Marie continued to attend further sittings for a while – the last documented ones date from 1907/08. Then she withdrew from the subject. In her (1923) biography of Pierre she mentions the Palladino episode only briefly and distantly. In 1911 she received her second Nobel Prize (Chemistry, for polonium and radium). Her scientific career from that point on remained strictly focused on radioactivity.
The distancing is understandable. First, Palladino's New York sittings in 1909/10 turned up clear evidence of cheating. Second, as a single mother and the only woman in a hostile scientific establishment, Marie depended on maximum reputation; public engagement with a contested subject was something she could not afford. Third, her own methodological scepticism had been greater than Pierre's from the start.
What remains
- A joint Nobel Prize in the experimental room. Pierre and Marie Curie were at the height of their scientific standing when they attended Palladino's sittings. This is not "esoterica at the margin" but top-level physics in laboratory mode – with all the methodological tools the science of the time possessed.
- Pierre Curie's formulation. "A whole new domain of facts and physical states of space of which we have no conception." That is – decades before Pauli and Einstein – the clean scientific response to real phenomena that do not fit existing frameworks.
- A historical "what if". Pierre Curie had a physical research plan for Palladino. Had he been able to carry it out after 19 April 1906, the history of the relationship between physics and the paranormal would in all likelihood have run differently.
- Palladino's difficult status. The case shows why mediumistic research has to be methodologically so strict: with the same person, in the same sitting, attempts at fraud and unexplained phenomena can occur side by side. This is what made the later, methodologically tighter work of Rhine through Beischel necessary in the first place.
The Curies belong in the historical line we are tracing on this site: Kepler, Jung, Pauli, Einstein, Rhine, PEAR. The idea that the "serious" 20th-century natural scientist swept the paranormal aside is historically wrong. Pierre Curie took it seriously – and did not fail at it, but died.
Sources
- Pierre Curie: letters to Louis Georges Gouy, 1905/06 – published in: Anna Hurwic, Pierre Curie. Flammarion / EDP Sciences, Paris 1995 (English: Pierre Curie, EDP Sciences 2003).
- Marie Curie: Pierre Curie. Macmillan, New York 1923.
- Institut Général Psychologique: Rapport sur les séances d'Eusapia Paladino. Bulletin de l'Institut Général Psychologique, Paris 1908.
- Hereward Carrington: Eusapia Palladino and Her Phenomena. Werner Laurie, London 1909 – primary observer source, but partisan.
- Carlos S. Alvarado: Eusapia Palladino. An autobiographical essay. Journal of Scientific Exploration, 2011 – modern source-critical reappraisal.
- Susan Quinn: Marie Curie. A Life. Simon & Schuster, New York 1995.
- Barbara Goldsmith: Obsessive Genius. The Inner World of Marie Curie. Norton, New York 2005.