Cultural Impact

After Marie Curie, along with her husband Pierre and Henri Becquerel jointly accepted the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903, "in recognition of the extraordinary services they have rendered by their joint researches on the radiation phenomena discovered by Professor Henri Becquerel" , the departure from the Newtonian Model of Physics reached its event horizon, and Einstein's Theory of Special Relativity would soon follow. While the discovery that there was an entire world a million times smaller than the head of a pin marked a quantum leap for scientists around the world, it would strike a blow to the human psyche of that generation that about equalled that experienced by anthropomorphic cultures when they discovered God did not live in the sky, or on top of a mountain.

World War I, which would follow 3 years after Curie's Second Nobel Prize in 1911 also marked a departure from the Napoleonic style of warfare, where combatants met eye to eye and the rules of engagement and the definition of honor were clear. Now they would kill one another from afar with automatic weapons, poison gas, and artillery whose wicked design and ability to maim and kill defied the imagination. Humanity as a whole felt, as never before, truly lost, devoid of purpose, and filled with uncertainty. Books such as "A Broken World", and "All Quiet on The Western Front", echo the sentiments of a society which for the first time realizes that the world it once knew, was somehow gone forever.