Art Making a Life in Science not feel so Scientific

When looking at the cover of Radioactive, the first words that grabbed my attention were “A Tale of Love and Fallout”, I was honestly hesitant to believe that this book was going to have a love story or anything like that due to my preconceived notions of what the book was going to be about. Marie and Pierre Curie were Nobel Prize winning physicists who discovered radioactivity; it even says so on the last page of part 1 in the book “Marie: ‘I coined the term radioactivity’”. But the book starts off looking at both Marie (originally known as Marya Sktodowska) and Pierre before they had met, this background into their personal lives is not something that was expected. In typical scientific articles discussing scientists and their lives it’s normally quite bland and it only touches on the fact that these people were married had kids; by going an extra level deeper, this book already began to feel much less like a book about a scientific discovery, and more like a book that talks about the Curies like they’re not just robotic scientists.

I think the art style that was chosen for this book is really interesting, I have never interacted with an art style like this and at first it made me a little uncomfortable. The pictures felt almost hard to look at, some of the faces were more out of the ordinary than I would expect in a normal picture book. But I felt that this style of art and the way that the book was written worked well together; a distinct example that I remember when reading through the book for the first time was the pages of the book that talked about when Marie had their daughter Irene and the page following that stated “The young couple returned to work”. These pages had orange, red and yellow colors on the pages giving it a really warm feeling-this use of color to express warmth was something that I could not get over. You could tell that the author wanted their audience to really feel the warmth that the Curies felt when they had their daughter and when they returned to work.

I think that the way the book is presented works well to get people interested in what was being discussed, but also to feel real raw emotions. In the Executive Summary from the Art as a Way of Knowing Conference had a statement from an individual named George Hein; he remarks that “it was only through nonlinear processes of synthesis — “by throwing things into a pot” — that they began to make breakthroughs in the creation of organic molecules.” I think that this book in a way represents what Hein is stating, this book feels kind of like everything about the Curies life was thrown into a pot and an artist simply took it and made a beautiful book that makes people feel real emotions and not just surface level emotions.

References:

Executive Summary (p1–9) from: McDougall, M., Bevan, B., & Semper, R. (2012). Art as a Way of Knowing Conference Report. Exploratorium. https://www.exploratorium.edu/knowing/reports.html

Part I (pages 15–107) of Redniss, L. (2015). Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout. Harper Collins