Madame Curie's transformation

My favourite essay in ‘The Faber Book of Science’ (edited by John Carey) is ‘Shedding Life’ by Miroslav Holub, who is a poet and immunologist. In this essay he recollects mopping up the blood of a recently shot muskrat, and he ponders on the exact nature of death. The death of an organism as a whole is generally taken to be defined as brain death or heart failure. But what about all the constituents of that organism? Holub points out that many of these; blood cells, hormones, enzymes etc., are all capable of living on for some time after the apparent death.

When Marie Curie died (in 1934) her belongings, such as her note books, were discovered to be so radioactive that they had to be deposited in lead-lined boxes. Even now, anyone who wants to look at them has to wear protective clothing.
She died of cancer, most likely caused by a lifetime of working with radioactive substances without being properly protected from the resulting radiation. Her most famous achievements were to discover new chemical elements, by virtue of the fact that they were radioactive. In making these discoveries she helped to shed light on the nature of radioactivity, and show that there are three different types; alpha, beta and gamma radiation. When an element emits or absorbs alpha or beta particles it changes into another element. This is why the study of radioactivity has been considered to be a sort of alchemy. (You can get gold from radioactive mercury, but it is very difficult).

Marie Curie worked with a uranium ore called pitchblende, exposing herself to alpha particles, and to radon gas. Both of these would have been absorbed by her body, causing damage to the cells. At an atomic level some of the alpha particles may have been absorbed by the atoms in the cells (Humans are carbon-based and so most of these atoms are carbon atoms. The process of carbon atoms absorbing alpha particles and transmuting into oxygen atoms is what happens in dying stars.)
Radon gas has a long half life but eventually decays into polonium, one of the elements Marie Curie is famous for discovering and which she named after the land of her birth; Poland. Polonium is called a ‘daughter product’ of radon as a result of this process.
Her body is interred in the Pantheon in Paris. It is still radioactive; alongside the more usual organic decay processes taking place there are also the atomic ones. She is being transmuted herself.

Free will with every packet of cornflakes

Yesterday I spent all day writing. What I produced was rubbish, all 2000 words of it. The words were flat and lifeless with no energy at all. In contrast, last week I was working on short story and the words zinged across the screen. I didn’t know where those words came from, I hadn’t planned them in advance. They just appeared.

Every fiction writer knows the excitement of setting up a situation and then being surprised at what happens next. Your characters can behave in ways that surprise you. Are they exhibiting free will? Even when you consciously plot out your characters’ stories, you have to be sensitive to what feels right and what doesn’t. If you force your characters to do something for the sake of the overall story, they may turn into puppets. They lose their ‘divine spark’ and the story can feel over-engineered. (Interestingly, this may only be true in literature. In Kleist’s famous essay on marionettes, he pointed out that they can be more graceful and more likely to achieve ‘perfection’ in their movements than humans, precisely because they lack human’s self-consciousness which, according to him, inhibits a complete understanding of the universe.)

Nowadays, free will is elusive. It suffered a fatal blow in the seventeenth century from Newton’s discovery of universal physical laws. The corresponding vision of a wholly predictable and mechanistic universe which only needs to be set going before it simply carries on for ever, doesn’t seem to need free will.

A universe that allows time travel (ours doesn’t appear to rule it out) must also impinge upon free will in some way, if only to prevent logical paradoxes (think of ‘Back to the Future’).

Is there any space for free will in quantum physics? After all, it (re)introduces uncertainty into physical systems, albeit on atomic scales. But this uncertainty (in the ability to know simultaneously an object’s position and momentum) is random. And when we exhibit free will, we don’t think we behave randomly.

Geneticists don’t have much time for free will, either. We’re creatures ruled by genes and all our behaviour can be explained by those genes’ desire to replicate themselves. Even apparent altruism to other people only seems to exist because we share practically all of our genetic material (99.9%).

So perhaps we enjoy reading about characters in novels who appear to exercise choice because that choice is a mirage in our real lives. Do our fictional characters have more free will than we do?