ABSTRACT
On the face of it, a world of difference separates the official photograph of the Solvay Conference of 1911 (Fig. 2) from Raphael's School of Athens (Fig. 3), completed exactly four hundred years earlier. At the Solvay Conference, a conclave of Nobel laureates and other distinguished scientists actually talked to one another, with an enthusiasm we can see in the photograph itself; indeed, Marie Curie, the lone woman in the foreground, is so absorbed in a conversation with Henri Poincaré that neither of them pays attention to the camera that records their presence. 1 We may also recognize a very young Albert Einstein, second from the right, and, fourth from the right, Ernest Rutherford. Max Planck stands second from the left, and Louis De Broglie stands sixth. At the Solvay Conference of 1927, Einstein would deliver his famous remark to Werner Heisenberg that ‘God does not play dice’, but by then the participants were so well confirmed in their individual greatness that dialogue had given way to pronouncements. In 1911, however, Marie Curie and Poincaré can pore intently over a text that seems to puzzle them both.
