1 00:00:14,459 --> 00:00:17,291 I recently published a book called 'Radioactive.' 2 00:00:17,291 --> 00:00:22,523 It's a visual book about invisible things. 3 00:00:22,523 --> 00:00:26,329 It combines artwork and written text. 4 00:00:26,329 --> 00:00:31,327 It tells the story of two scientists, Marie and Pierre Curie. 5 00:00:31,327 --> 00:00:35,461 It's a love story and a story full of drama. 6 00:00:35,461 --> 00:00:38,580 At the turn of the 19th century a young woman moves 7 00:00:38,580 --> 00:00:44,001 from Russian-occupied Poland to come study in Paris. 8 00:00:44,001 --> 00:00:46,715 She finds room to do her research in the laboratory 9 00:00:46,715 --> 00:00:52,214 of a reserved and handsome scientist studying heat and magnetism. 10 00:00:52,214 --> 00:00:54,768 They fall in love. 11 00:00:54,768 --> 00:01:00,159 They marry and have two children and begin working together. 12 00:01:00,159 --> 00:01:02,291 They discover two new elements, 13 00:01:02,291 --> 00:01:05,951 expanding the Periodic Table, with radium and polonium, 14 00:01:05,951 --> 00:01:11,740 and they begin investigating the startling properties of these two elements. 15 00:01:11,740 --> 00:01:14,268 She coins the word 'radioactivity.' 16 00:01:14,268 --> 00:01:17,910 They recognise this radioactivity to be an atomic property. 17 00:01:17,910 --> 00:01:20,101 And this is a momentous insight. 18 00:01:20,101 --> 00:01:24,831 It's one of the critical moments in the history of modern science. 19 00:01:24,831 --> 00:01:27,031 They win the Nobel Prize. 20 00:01:27,031 --> 00:01:29,347 And all seems to be going quite well -- 21 00:01:29,347 --> 00:01:32,948 great marriage, accomplished couple, two beautiful daughters. 22 00:01:32,948 --> 00:01:40,011 And then in 1906, Pierre Curie is killed in a tragic street accident. 23 00:01:40,011 --> 00:01:42,169 Marie is forced to continue their work alone, 24 00:01:42,169 --> 00:01:46,025 which she does, earning a second Nobel Prize. 25 00:01:46,025 --> 00:01:47,646 Which, by the way, is completely unprecedented. 26 00:01:47,646 --> 00:01:50,518 Now not only is she the first woman to have won the Nobel Prize 27 00:01:50,518 --> 00:01:52,759 but she is the first Double Nobel Laureate 28 00:01:52,759 --> 00:01:56,064 in two different sciences, Chemistry and Physics. 29 00:01:56,064 --> 00:01:58,778 And a few years later she falls in love again -- 30 00:01:58,778 --> 00:02:02,608 this time with the physicist Paul Langevin. 31 00:02:02,608 --> 00:02:08,542 Another fabulous romance -- a coupling of two scientific giants -- 32 00:02:08,542 --> 00:02:12,826 but, unfortunately, there is a catch. 33 00:02:12,826 --> 00:02:16,268 Langevin was married. 34 00:02:16,268 --> 00:02:19,062 Needless to say -- famous people in a love triangle -- 35 00:02:19,062 --> 00:02:24,414 scandal ensued, duels were fought. 36 00:02:24,414 --> 00:02:26,958 So this a 200-odd page book. 37 00:02:26,958 --> 00:02:30,469 In addition to the narrative about the Curies' biography, 38 00:02:30,469 --> 00:02:34,051 it also leaps forward in time to look at the contemporary 39 00:02:34,051 --> 00:02:36,602 ramifications of the Curies' work. 40 00:02:36,602 --> 00:02:40,155 From nuclear weapons to nuclear power to nuclear medicine. 41 00:02:40,155 --> 00:02:44,859 But, long story short, there are these two central themes: 42 00:02:44,859 --> 00:02:46,741 Radioactivity and love. 43 00:02:46,741 --> 00:02:50,681 Those are the invisible things I was referring to earlier. 44 00:02:50,681 --> 00:02:56,176 And, because this is a book in which I'm doing the writing and the research 45 00:02:56,176 --> 00:03:00,300 and the artwork and also the design of the book itself, 46 00:03:00,300 --> 00:03:04,842 it's very important to me that each of these components is meaningful 47 00:03:04,842 --> 00:03:09,604 and that they each embody the ideas in the narrative. 48 00:03:09,604 --> 00:03:12,739 So, when it became time for me to choose the medium 49 00:03:12,739 --> 00:03:14,740 with which I was going to create the artwork -- 50 00:03:14,740 --> 00:03:17,726 and in fact choice is very important - 51 00:03:17,726 --> 00:03:20,612 I decided that I would make the images with something 52 00:03:20,612 --> 00:03:23,827 called cyanotype printing. Cyanotype printing is 53 00:03:23,827 --> 00:03:25,992 a camera-less photographic technique. 54 00:03:25,992 --> 00:03:29,499 And I had two reasons for this choice. 55 00:03:29,499 --> 00:03:33,171 The first was thematic. 56 00:03:33,171 --> 00:03:39,258 To make a cyanotype print, you take paper, you coat it with certain chemicals. 57 00:03:39,258 --> 00:03:41,512 You take that chemically coated paper, you expose them 58 00:03:41,512 --> 00:03:46,259 to the ultraviolet rays of the sun and that turns the paper a deep blue. 59 00:03:46,259 --> 00:03:52,200 Now, a process using exposure to penetrating rays -- 60 00:03:52,200 --> 00:03:57,493 I thought made sense in a book about the history of radioactivity. 61 00:03:57,493 --> 00:04:00,739 And, my second reason was aesthetic. 62 00:04:00,739 --> 00:04:04,722 A cyanotype print has this kind of moody, twilight quality. 63 00:04:04,722 --> 00:04:08,436 The white lines against the blue background -- 64 00:04:08,436 --> 00:04:10,546 I thought captured what Marie Curie described 65 00:04:10,546 --> 00:04:13,541 as the element radium's spontaneous luminosity. 66 00:04:13,541 --> 00:04:16,061 A kind of internal glow. 67 00:04:16,061 --> 00:04:21,145 So, I just want to step you through here the making of one page in the book. 68 00:04:21,145 --> 00:04:25,979 This is a spread, it depicts the royal banquet when Marie 69 00:04:25,979 --> 00:04:30,270 has arrived in Stockholm to accept her second Nobel Prize. 70 00:04:30,270 --> 00:04:33,919 So just to take one step back from that -- 71 00:04:33,919 --> 00:04:36,633 When I begin, basically, I'm always collecting drawings. 72 00:04:36,633 --> 00:04:41,638 I'm just, everyday drawing and I never know when I do a drawing 73 00:04:41,638 --> 00:04:43,728 if it's going to end up in my published work, 74 00:04:43,728 --> 00:04:47,403 but I just keep gathering this little archive for myself. 75 00:04:47,403 --> 00:04:51,520 This is a still life I did on my kitchen table. 76 00:04:51,520 --> 00:04:55,454 These are some jazz musicians that I drew at a club downtown. 77 00:04:55,454 --> 00:05:01,217 My sketchbook from a Parsons' faculty meeting. 78 00:05:01,217 --> 00:05:06,372 I was doing archival research looking at different source material. 79 00:05:06,372 --> 00:05:11,854 And then, I take these disparate elements and I recombine 80 00:05:11,854 --> 00:05:15,285 them into one composition that gives them a new context. 81 00:05:15,285 --> 00:05:18,108 And sometimes I'm surprised by the new meaning 82 00:05:18,108 --> 00:05:22,325 that emerges from this new context. 83 00:05:22,325 --> 00:05:25,142 Because I wanna make a cyanotype printing, I then take this drawing, 84 00:05:25,142 --> 00:05:30,427 I turn it into a negative on transparency, on an acetate sheet. 85 00:05:30,427 --> 00:05:33,879 I then take that acetate sheet, I place it on the chemically coated paper. 86 00:05:33,879 --> 00:05:38,304 As I mentioned, I expose that to the UV-rays of the sun. 87 00:05:38,304 --> 00:05:43,337 And -- this is the blue image that would result. 88 00:05:43,337 --> 00:05:48,271 I'll then oftentimes hand-color the image -- in this case with color-pencil. 89 00:05:48,271 --> 00:05:52,340 And then, the final step is adding the typeface. 90 00:05:52,340 --> 00:05:56,553 So, this all makes the process seem very smooth. 91 00:05:56,553 --> 00:05:58,488 Which, of course it never is. 92 00:05:58,488 --> 00:06:04,838 So, now I tell you the truth, which is in one example: 93 00:06:04,838 --> 00:06:11,485 as I mentioned earlier, Pierre Curie was killed in 1906 in a street accident. 94 00:06:11,485 --> 00:06:15,383 And when I got to working on this part of the narrative, I really struggled. 95 00:06:15,383 --> 00:06:22,027 Because I couldn't imagine how I was going to portray this harrowing moment. 96 00:06:22,027 --> 00:06:27,449 How could I capture in an image the wrenching emotion of a man killed, 97 00:06:27,449 --> 00:06:32,604 a woman who loses her husband, her scientific partner, the father of her children. 98 00:06:32,604 --> 00:06:36,133 I looked to Japanese prints and their portrayal of grief. 99 00:06:36,133 --> 00:06:41,257 I read Marie Curie's own diaries, which are just devastating. 100 00:06:41,257 --> 00:06:46,852 She's described seeing her husband's body, it's decomposing corpse. 101 00:06:46,852 --> 00:06:50,387 And I cringe to show you this image but I will -- 102 00:06:50,387 --> 00:06:53,308 This is my first attempt and I'm sure you'll agree -- 103 00:06:53,308 --> 00:06:56,136 I think it falls far short. 104 00:06:56,136 --> 00:07:00,070 I tried overexposing the print to see if I could add drama. 105 00:07:00,070 --> 00:07:05,154 I tried underexposing the print to make the atmosphere dark and ominous. 106 00:07:05,154 --> 00:07:09,039 I tried inverting the image to make the skeleton white and the woman in negative. 107 00:07:09,039 --> 00:07:10,984 And just nothing worked. 108 00:07:10,984 --> 00:07:14,771 I knew this was not the right answer. 109 00:07:14,771 --> 00:07:18,520 But, since I wasn't getting it, I just set this section aside 110 00:07:18,520 --> 00:07:22,295 and I decided to pick up another part of the book 111 00:07:22,295 --> 00:07:24,669 and I started working on a section that 112 00:07:24,669 --> 00:07:29,283 comes much later totally different mood. 113 00:07:29,283 --> 00:07:34,304 It's World War One and Marie Curie is fleeing Paris 114 00:07:34,304 --> 00:07:38,687 carrying a lead suitcase, with her country's supply of radium. 115 00:07:38,687 --> 00:07:42,954 She's taking it to Bordeaux to prevent it from falling into German hands. 116 00:07:42,954 --> 00:07:47,371 And in the text she's describing her adventure and -- 117 00:07:47,371 --> 00:07:50,829 the orange here is a digital manipulation -- 118 00:07:50,829 --> 00:07:56,462 But when I first attempted at printing this image, this happened. 119 00:07:56,462 --> 00:08:02,223 So I had completely botched the chemicals and got this print 120 00:08:02,223 --> 00:08:05,414 where basically none of the lines of the drawing showed up. 121 00:08:05,414 --> 00:08:07,059 You really can't see anything. 122 00:08:07,059 --> 00:08:10,481 So I knew immediately that I was going to have to reprint it. 123 00:08:10,481 --> 00:08:15,502 But, I was shocked by the image that had resulted from my mistake. 124 00:08:15,502 --> 00:08:20,784 And when I thought about it, in the context of that section 125 00:08:20,784 --> 00:08:26,001 about Pierre Curie's death something hit me 126 00:08:26,001 --> 00:08:32,537 and I thought, well, actually, it would be much more interesting 127 00:08:32,537 --> 00:08:35,789 to use an image of nothing basically, an image 128 00:08:35,789 --> 00:08:44,303 that could suggest the power -- the feeling of loss, rather than spell it out. 129 00:08:44,303 --> 00:08:48,915 So, it's a little hard to see in this slide but this is 130 00:08:48,915 --> 00:08:53,979 the layout of that spread in the book about Pierre Curie's death. 131 00:08:53,979 --> 00:08:58,800 I took that accidental image I scrapped those terrible skeleton drawings. 132 00:08:58,800 --> 00:09:02,735 I placed that accidental image facing a black page 133 00:09:02,735 --> 00:09:08,458 with the lines in grey, of Marie Curie's diary -- 134 00:09:08,458 --> 00:09:12,102 And I think, that in the end this is a solution 135 00:09:12,102 --> 00:09:15,516 that is more subtle and hopefully more powerful 136 00:09:15,516 --> 00:09:17,763 than the one I had originally planned. 137 00:09:17,763 --> 00:09:22,654 It was a solution I had to really stumble into. 138 00:09:22,654 --> 00:09:28,637 But, of course, it's not just the artistic process that's full of accidents. 139 00:09:28,637 --> 00:09:34,085 The history of science is full of serendipitous discoveries. 140 00:09:34,085 --> 00:09:38,553 In fact, the discovery of cyanotype chemicals themselves was an accident. 141 00:09:38,553 --> 00:09:44,190 In the 17th century, there was a child born at the Castle Frankenstein 142 00:09:44,190 --> 00:09:47,655 named Johann Conrad Dippel. And Dippel went on to become -- 143 00:09:47,655 --> 00:09:50,694 I'm not making this up -- (Laughter) 144 00:09:50,694 --> 00:09:53,003 Dippel went on to become an alchemist and he wanted 145 00:09:53,003 --> 00:09:56,487 to create a universal remedy, a kind of elixir of life. 146 00:09:56,487 --> 00:10:01,251 So he started to gather all kinds of animals' skins and hooves 147 00:10:01,251 --> 00:10:06,178 and horns, and all sorts of unsavory things into what he called a Dippel's oil. 148 00:10:06,178 --> 00:10:08,823 Now, Dippel shared his lab with a dye-maker. 149 00:10:08,823 --> 00:10:13,974 And one day this dye-maker was cooking up a brilliant red hue. 150 00:10:13,974 --> 00:10:16,773 But he ran out of his key ingredient so he reaches 151 00:10:16,773 --> 00:10:19,363 into the cabinet and he pulls out the Dippel's oil. 152 00:10:19,363 --> 00:10:21,726 He adds the Dippel's oil, stirs it up and instead of this 153 00:10:21,726 --> 00:10:26,963 scarlet pigment that he was looking for, he gets a deep blue. 154 00:10:26,963 --> 00:10:30,920 It was vivid, it was light-fast and it became instantly popular. 155 00:10:30,920 --> 00:10:34,686 The Prussian army took it up to dye their uniforms. 156 00:10:34,686 --> 00:10:37,204 And we still use this formula today, and one of the forms 157 00:10:37,204 --> 00:10:42,054 we see it in is in the images of a cyanotype print. 158 00:10:42,054 --> 00:10:46,520 But that's just one of the many examples from science 159 00:10:46,520 --> 00:10:48,142 of a serendipitous discovery. 160 00:10:48,142 --> 00:10:50,454 We have Archimedes and his bathtub, 161 00:10:50,454 --> 00:10:52,777 we have Isaac and the apple, 162 00:10:52,777 --> 00:10:57,875 we have Christopher Columbus setting out for India and finding the New World. 163 00:10:57,875 --> 00:11:02,341 Someone is looking for one thing and they find another. 164 00:11:02,341 --> 00:11:06,826 Indeed, in 1896, the physicist Henri Becquerel 165 00:11:06,826 --> 00:11:11,115 was prepping for an experiment using uranium salts. 166 00:11:11,115 --> 00:11:14,041 For this experiment he needed bright light. 167 00:11:14,041 --> 00:11:17,542 So, because it was overcast on that particular day, 168 00:11:17,542 --> 00:11:20,558 he took his uranium nuggets and tossed them into a desk drawer 169 00:11:20,558 --> 00:11:23,709 where they happened to fall upon a photographic plate. 170 00:11:23,709 --> 00:11:26,209 He closed the drawer and left the lab. 171 00:11:26,209 --> 00:11:28,815 When a couple of days later he came back, 172 00:11:28,815 --> 00:11:32,688 he opened the drawer and found that photographic plate to look 173 00:11:32,688 --> 00:11:35,940 as if it had been exposed to brilliant light -- 174 00:11:35,940 --> 00:11:37,989 which of course it hadn't. 175 00:11:37,989 --> 00:11:42,192 It was the uranium salts themselves that had exposed the plates. 176 00:11:42,192 --> 00:11:48,276 Henri Becquerel had just stumbled into something very significant. 177 00:11:48,276 --> 00:11:52,292 A couple of scientists named Marie and Pierre Curie took up the lead. 178 00:11:52,292 --> 00:11:57,759 She coined the word 'radioactivity' and the rest is history. 179 00:11:57,759 --> 00:12:04,192 So, I just want to say that as we work toward, whatever we think our goals are, 180 00:12:04,192 --> 00:12:09,352 I think we should pay as much attention to our missteps as to our successes. 181 00:12:09,352 --> 00:12:11,976 And if at first you don't succeed it -- 182 00:12:11,976 --> 00:12:15,127 it might just be the best thing that ever happened to you. 183 00:12:15,127 --> 00:12:17,458 (Applause)