Albert Einstein/Mileva Maric: The Love Letters

This a nice collection of love letters between Albert Einstein and his first wife, Mileva Maric. If you don't know the rest of the tragic story (for her, anyway), it's just as well. It's enough to make you reflect on the amount of pain that love turn to hate can engender.They cover the period when he is getting his PhD, his first job at the patent office (which he was happy to get, by the way) in Zurich, and the birth of their first, but illegitimate child, a daughter named Lieserl, whose eventual whereabouts became a mystery (see the excellent Einstein's Daughter by Michele Zackheim for an exhaustive search for Lieserl).What is most intriguing about these letters is the number of times Einstein refers to "our" in his scientific work. He has never acknowledged Mileva's help, but I don't know how anyone can avoid the conclusion that she was a collaborator during the critical period leading up to 1905. Consider the following, in Einstein's own words: " . . . our work on relative motion . . . "(p. 39); "Don't [Mileva] forget to check on the extent to which glass conforms to the Dulong-Petit law." (p. 40); " . . .our theory of molecular forces . . ."(p. 45); " . . . enough empirical material for our investigation . . . "(p. 47); and "I gave him our paper" (p. 52). There are other references.Mileva has had her defenders in the last ten or fifteen years, but for the most part those who want to keep the Einstein myth alive that whatever he did, he did without any help have relegated her to the role of some sort of amanuensis and helpmeet. If the word "our" means what I think it means, she was a whole lot more than that.For those who think the sainted Einstein did not get any help from a mere woman, consider the following: "Poincare undoubtedly discovered many of the ideas that now form our mental picture of the theory of special relativity and associate with the name of Einstein," (HENRI POINCARE, Jeremy Gray, Princeton, 2014, p.368).

There can be no doubt about it .Mileva Maric(Marity)was a collaborator with Albert Einstein on one or more of the 4 1905 papers published by Max Planck in his German language journal.Her main contribution probably was in explaining to Albert the 1887 Michelson -Morley light refraction-reflection experimental results demonstrating that the speed of light had to be a constant.This would mean that there was no "ether" medium in which light would travel .Understanding these results are a necessary,but not sufficient, prerequisite to building a special or general theory of Relativity.Albert Einstein deliberately left out any reference to these results because he knew that it was Mileva who had helped him master this area of research.He wanted to pretend that he had reached his conclusions without resort to these extremely important empirical- experimental findings or any other empirical work.Albert Einstein was ,of course,the main author of the papers.His refusal to acknowledge her partial contribution means that Albert was a glory grabber in the same sense that Otto Hahn was in refusing to acknowledge the great aid of Lise Meitner in the discovery of nuclear fission.

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Einstein was a brilliant jerk! Mileva was a hell of a woman who really aided him in his work. He really never got far beyond what he discovered with her at his side.

Renn and Schulmann have performed a valuable service by collecting all the surviving early correspondence in one volume. However, it is not the case that this is a book that the "Einstein establishment doesn't want you to read", as the letters had already been translated and published five years before in the first volume of the Albert Einstein Collected Papers. Nor do they show that Mileva was a collaborator on Einstein's celebrated 1905 papers, as has been argued on the basis of highly selective quotations from the letters. For instance, against the one occasion (in March 1901) that Einstein, in the context of his reassuring Mileva of his continuing love, refers to "our work" on relative motion there are over a dozen occasions when he refers to *his* work on the electrodynamics of moving bodies, e.g., "I'm busily at work on an electrodynamics of moving bodies..." (17 December 1901), and "I spent all afternoon at Kleiner's in Zurich telling him about my ideas on the electrodynamics of moving bodies..." (19 December 2001). In any case, the crucial breakthrough to the special relativity principle occurred in the early summer of 1905, some four years after the much-quoted words of March 1901, and there is no evidence that Mileva had any part in this. One reviewer suggests that Mileva played the role of explaining to Einstein the Michelson-Morley experiment, but there is not a single piece of evidence to support this contention. Furthermore, the theoretical basis on which Einstein postulated the constancy of the speed of light was his radical view of the nature of space-time, not the null result of the Michelson-Morley experiment.Apart from the fact that in these early letters *all* the ideas on extra-curricular physics on which Einstein was working come from him, some of the instances of his referring to "our" or "your" work relate to their Zurich Polytechnic diploma dissertations, for which they had both chosen topics in heat conduction. Einstein was certainly keen to draw Mileva into his extra-curricular studies, as his letters frequently show, but there is no evidence that she played more than a supporting role here. A notable absence in Mileva's letters is any discussion of extra-curricular physics, even in the two instances where we have her letters in response to ones of Einstein in which he excitedly discusses his latest ideas. In the words of one of the co-editors of the book, Robert Schulmann: "All serious Einstein scholarship has shown that the scientific collaboration between the couple was slight and one-sided."

What a wonderful find this book was! Reading it created the opportunity to see into Einstein's mind as well as his heart. I was unfamiliar with the details of Einstein's personal life. This story, what happened to Einstein and Mileva as fellow students, as friends, as physicists, as lovers, as out-of-wedlock parents, and eventually as spouses was interesting and in it's own way, heartbreaking. So much as Einstein's life was revealed in this book. It was truly a fascinating read!

This was a good read and the book was in excellent condition.

They were soulmates and Albert's family destroyed them.