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| Einstein Letters |
Who was the real Mileva Einstein-Maric, the wife of the famed physicist Albert Einstein? Trained alongside Einstein in physics and mathematics, what role did she play, if any, in the famous papers of her husband, which transformed contemporary physics? Was she an unsung contributor or even a co-author, a sounding board, the top fiddle, a glorified assistant, an unglorified housewife, the one who made it all possible?
What does it even matter? It matters, of course, because Einstein’s work and his theories of relativity, quantum theory, and atomic theory formed the foundations of contemporary physics. Without the true story of what really happened—how these fundamental theories came about—we cannot fully understand their historical significance. Moreover, we cannot bestow credit where credit is due for these achievements, especially when we recognize how often the contributions of women scientists, especially the scientific spouses and partners of celebrated male scientists, are overlooked, forgotten, and even suppressed.
Much has been written over the past decades in support of one or more of the above perspectives on Mileva Einstein-Maric, often with fervent certitude.
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| Albert Einstein et Arthur Compton professeur à l'université de Chicago, circa 1930 à Chicago, IL |
It is well known that Albert Einstein, the world-famous scientist declared the “person of the century” by TIME magazine, was married. But until the 1990s, few people knew that he had two wives, the first of whom was trained in mathematics and physics. Einstein’s nonscientific second wife, Elsa, did become widely known, especially in the United States, when she accompanied her husband on several well-publicized visits during the 1920s, then settled with him in Princeton in 1933 (she died three years later). The two had married in 1919, the same year that the first public confirmation of Einstein’s theory of general relativity, one of the greatest achievements of the 20th century, brought him worldwide fame.
But it was his first wife, Mileva Einstein-Maric (approximately pronounced Mar-itch), who accompanied and supported him intellectually and emotionally throughout the difficult early years of his rise from a beginning physics student in 1896 to the top of his profession by 1914. Little was known about her or his children with her — and there was little interest in finding out — until the discovery in 1986 of her correspondence with Einstein brought Mileva Einstein-Maric to widespread public attention. The letters had been in the possession of the Einsteins’ first son, Hans Albert Einstein, and his family in Berkeley, Calif.
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| Albert Einstein with his wife Elsa, State, War, and Navy building in background, Washington DC. Photographer Harris and Ewing. 1921 and 1923. |
The story of Mileva Einstein-Maric encompasses many facets of great human and scientific interest related to the struggle of women in science as revealed by observing one woman’s struggle to realize her dreams for a scientific career and examining a married couple’s scientific and personal partnership that unfortunately did not succeed.
Widespread public recognition of the captivating story of Einstein’s wife Mileva Einstein-Maric emerged during the years following the publication of the first volume of The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein in 1987. That volume, titled The Early Years, 1879–1902, documented young Einstein’s youth, education, and early career. Of special interest in the volume was the first publication of 51 of the then newly discovered Einstein-Maric letters in the possession of Hans Albert’s family. Subsequent letters have appeared in later volumes.
General Theory of Relativity
In his theory, Einstein had predicted the existence of gravitational waves on paper more than a century ago. The latest finding not only proves his theory but also opens up a new horizon for astronomers to understand black holes better.
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Nuclear Power
Although Einstein never worked on atomic or nuclear technology, his theory of mass energy equivalence played a significant role in establishing a relation between mass and energy — laying the foundation for the first atomic bomb.
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Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG)
One of the papers submitted by Einstein about Brownian motion helps in understanding the random motion of particles suspended in a fluid. The liquefaction of gases, or the change of gas into liquid by the reduction in its molecular energy levels, is the only reason we have been able to compress and transport LPG easily.
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Global Positioning System (GPS)
The theory of relativity is used in many of our modern electronics, including GPS systems, which are made up of three components: the control component, the space component, and the user component. The space component consists of satellites that are placed in specific orbits. The control component consists of a station to which all of the data from the space component is sent. Many relativistic effects occur in GPS systems. Since each of the components is in different reference frames, all of the relativistic effects need to be accounted for so that the GPS works with precision. The clocks used in the GPS systems need to be synchronized. In GPS systems, the gravitational field of the Earth has to be accounted for. There are relativistic effects within the satellite that is in space that need to be accounted for too. GPS systems work with such precision because of the Theory of Relativity.
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Digital Cameras
A digital camera absorbs light and channels it through a lens onto a sensor which has tiny photosites (pixels) that are sensitive to light. As light falls on these pixels, electrons are released by a photoelectric effect, which then helps generates a picture.
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That first volume of Einstein’s Collected Papers also brought to public attention a previously little-known but subsequently highly influential biography of Mileva Einstein-Maric by the Serbian science professor Desanka Trbuhovic-Gjuric, Im Schatten Albert Einsteins: Das tragische Leben der Mileva Einstein-Maric (In the Shadow of Albert Einstein: The Tragic Life of Mileva Einstein-Maric). Originally published in Serbian in 1969, it went through two German editions and four printings as well as one French translation from 1982 to 1995, but it has never been published in English translation. Nonetheless, her biography (through its intermediaries) has helped more than any other work so far to shape the dominant public story of Mileva Einstein-Maric and her personal and scientific relationships with Albert Einstein.
While tracing Mileva Einstein-Maric’s life story, Trbuhovic-Gjuric argued, often without source citation or solid evidence, that Maric was a brilliant mathematician who surpassed Einstein in mathematics, if not physics. Moreover, owing to her expert collaboration with Einstein, Maric was allegedly an unrecognized co-author of her husband’s famous relativity paper of 1905. If true, such claims would mean that once again, as so often in the past (and present), the contributions made by the wife of a great man have been sadly overlooked by the public, forgotten by history, and apparently even suppressed by her husband.
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| Einstein, Albert - physicist, Germany/USA *14.03.1879-18.04.1955+ - Albert Einstein at a railway station at his return to Berlin - Photographer: Herbert Hoffmann - Published by: 'Tempo' 15.03.1931 Vintage property of ullstein bild |
On Feb. 18, 1990, nearly three years after the publication of the first volume of Einstein’s Collected Papers, a session on “The Young Einstein” during the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in New Orleans brought Mileva Einstein-Maric and her marriage with Einstein to widespread public attention. Most of the speakers at the AAAS session presented scholarly reevaluations of Einstein’s early biography, cultural environment, and philosophy. But two of the speakers, both of whom were without any prior work on Einstein studies, seized upon the opportunity to create a full-scale interpretation of Maric and her scientific relationship with Einstein for English-speaking audiences.
Drawing upon Trbuhovic-Gjuric and the Einstein-Maric letters for their individual papers, they forcefully argued the startling conclusion that Mileva Einstein-Maric made substantive contributions to Einstein’s early work.
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| Einstein, Albert - physicist, Germany/USA *14.03.1879-18.04.1955+ - the hands of Albert Einstein - 01.01.1927 - Vintage property of ullstein bild |
The sweeping and surprising assertions about Mileva Einstein-Maric and her husband drew enormous public and media interest, as well as an outpouring of books and articles on the apparent injustices suffered by “Einstein’s first wife.” She seemed to be the most prominent and most blatant example of how history has forgotten, even deliberately so, the contributions female scientific spouses and partners made to the great achievements of male scientists. The early history of contemporary physics thus required immediate correction. Many of the resulting popular works unquestioningly repeated, and even embellished, the claims of their predecessors, in some cases without apparent regard for common standards of nonfiction writing. Over the years what might be called the “Mileva Story” emerged and entered the public domain as the generally accepted account of Mileva Einstein-Maric’s unrecognized collaboration with her former husband and her contributions to his work. But at the same time, on closer examination, Einstein scholars have generally rejected most of this story on the basis of the available documentary evidence. As the physics historian Alberto Martínez wrote, “I want her to be the secret collaborator. But we should set aside our speculative preferences and instead look at the evidence.”
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| Albert Einstein,Albert Einstein (*14.03.1879-18.04.1955+) , Physiker, Deutschland/USA, Porträt, - vermutl. um 1950 |
Historians’ objections to the Mileva Story have gained increasing support in the years since 1990 with the abundance of new documentary material and information made available about Maric, Einstein, and their relationship. In view of the mounting primary and secondary material, it seems appropriate at this time, nearly three decades since the public emergence of the Mileva Story, to reevaluate the many elements of such an important historical assertion on the basis of all of the available evidence, new and old.
This approach reveals how far one can go wrong when standards for historical and nonfiction writing are not carefully followed. But more importantly, it reveals the very human, real story of a fallible, yet brave and determined young woman who, for various reasons, was not able to fulfill her dreams for the career and marriage she had hoped for. This more realistic and compelling story of Mileva Maric offers a far greater service to her—and to readers’ appreciation of her international pioneering role in helping to open science and science education to female students—than any exaggerated or unfounded assertions regarding her activities.
