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Product Details
Paperback: 140 pages
Publisher: Princeton University Press (October 31, 2000)
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.Read more ›
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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.Read more ›
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The title of this book is a misnomer - first, the correspondence is mainly one-sided and second, the letters cover the period that Einstein was living with his mom and dad in Italy and Mileva was bearing the disgrace of a pregnancy in Serbia while Einstein refused to marry her. I don't know that I would call that love.
While Einstein does state clearly in the letters that he and Mileva were working on "their theories," some critics claim that he must have been kidding around because there are no letters from her about their theories. Were Mileva's letters destroyed on purpose because they did contain scientific contribution or did Einstein simply throw them away? Either way, it is only Mileva's love that is exemplified in that she kept Albert's letters.
Einstein never saw the daughter, "Liserl," that he wrote about - never bothered to visit Serbia or arrange to meet Mileva and Liserl somewhere so that he could see his child (surely Mileva's wealthy parents would have paid for this). Even when he finally married Mileva, Liserl was not part of the family. In fact, Liserl disappeared (according to descendants of Mileva in Serbia. Liserl was sent to live with distant relatives in order to prevent scandal for Einstein).
So while these letters are valuable in that they prove that Mileva did contribute to the theories that made Einstein famous, they are not love letters.
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This item: Albert Einstein/Mileva Maric: The Love Letters
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