Albert Einstein to Marie Curie: Scorn Those Sexist Trolls!

Apparently, not much has changed since 1911. This year, female video game fans and developers were driven from their homes by sexist Gamergate trolls, while just a little over 100 years ago, double Nobel Prize-winning physicist and chemist Marie Cure was forced to face a very similar misogynistic angry mob. Except in 1911, the mob showed up to her house, IRL, instead of sending her death threats on the Internet.

In new Albert Einstein letters discovered by David Grinspoon, Einstein basically tells Curie to ignore the haters who denied her a seat at the French Academy of Sciences. Curie, a widow, was in a relationship with physicist Paul Langevin, who was a married man but estranged from his wife, and the Academy took it upon itself to judge her not on her successes in science but on her intimate life.

Einstein advised her: "Don't read that hogwash, but rather leave it to the reptile for whom it has been fabricated." Good man, that Mr. Einstein. Curie eventually did, in the words of Taylor Swift, shake it off, winning her second Nobel Prize (this time in chemistry) for the discovery of radium and polonium later that year. You go, girl!