Albert Einstein Mileva Maric: The Love Letters [Hardcover]

Albert Einstein (Author), Jurgen Renn (Author), Robert Schulmann (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1992

In 1903, despite the vehement objections of his parents, Albert Einstein married Mileva Maric, the companion, colleague and confidante whose influence on his most creative years has given rise to much speculation. Beginning in 1897, after Einstein and Maric met as students at the Swiss Federal Polytechnic, and ending shortly after their marriage, these 54 love letters offer a rare glimpse into Einstein's relationship with his first wife while shedding light on his intellectual development in the period before the annus mirabilis of 1905. Unlike the picture of Einstein as the lone, isolated thinker of Princeton, he appears here both as the burgeoning enfant terrible of science and as an amorous young man beset, along with his fiancee, by financial and personal struggles - among them the illegitimate birth of their daughter, whose existence is known only by these letters.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

"When I'm back in Zurich, the first thing we'll do is climb the Utliberg. . . . And then we'll start in on Hemholtz's electromagnetic theory of light." So wrote the 20-year-old Einstein to fellow physics student Maric. Of these 54 short letters, written from 1897 to 1903, the year they wed, all but three have been included by Renn and Schulman in the publisher's Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, vol. 1. The letters reveal the disdain of Einstein's bourgeois family for his ambitious, slightly older Serbian lover "Dollie," who would bear his child Lieserl. The baby is referred to in only a couple of letters, and her fate remains a mystery. The editors' brief introduction and explanatory endnotes do little to illuminate the letters' many scholarly and scientific references. While Maric (who wrote only 11 letters) remains a shadowy figure, Einstein, whom she addresses as "Johnnie," touches on issues and sources in the field of physics that occupy his thinking. These references, however, will be of interest mainly to readers familiar with the theories he would later develop.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

When personal letters of well-known people are published, readers expect either new intimate details of the correspondents' lives or developments in the writers' personalities, ideas, and relationships or both. In this collection, readers will find information about a few topics that excited Einstein in his youth and how he interacted with his professors. They will even find that Maric, who was Einstein's first wife, read the same books and had interests and intellectual abilities similar to Einstein's. Unfortunately, none of this is really new information nor is it exciting to read. The letters provide neither intriguing details about Einstein and Maric's personal lives nor much background information that will help us better understand Einstein. The greatest problem with this book is that 51 of the 54 letters were already published in The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein , Vol. 1: The Early Years: 1879-1902 (Princeton Univ. Pr., 1987), which also includes other works that help put the letters in a different perspective. As the full collected works are a better choice, this volume is not recommended.
- Eric D. Albright, Galter Health Sciences Lib., Northwestern Univ., Chicago
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 160 pages
• Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr; 1St Edition edition (April 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0691087601
• ISBN-13: 978-0691087603
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,202,653 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Albert Einstein (1879-1955) was born in Germany and became an American citizen in 1940. A world-famous theoretical physicist, he was awarded the 1921 Nobel Prize for Physics and is renowned for his Theory of Relativity. In addition to his scientific work, Einstein was an influential humanist who spoke widely about politics, ethics, and social causes. After leaving Europe, Einstein taught at Princeton University. His theories were instrumental in shaping the atomic age.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A lot more than a secretary, March 29, 2005

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Reader (San Diego, CA United States) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Albert Einstein/Mileva Maric: The Love Letters (Paperback)

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 more than that.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Superb translations of the Einstein-Maric early letters, May 29, 2010

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A. H. Esterson (London) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Albert Einstein/Mileva Maric: The Love Letters (Paperback)

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."

4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent ! The book that the Einstein establishment doesn't want you to read, January 19, 2008

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Michael Emmett Brady "mandmbrady" (Bellflower, California ,United States) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Albert Einstein/Mileva Maric: The Love Letters (Paperback)

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.