Customer Reviews

MILEVA MARIC, the Other Einstein [VHS]

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

The materials are indeed well-presented, given the amount of background available on her (there is some redundancy with Isaacson's book Einstein: His Life and Universe). The sound on the DVD that I have is not the best quality, with treble and bass not well balanced; but it is tolerable. For the price of this DVD the quality should be better.

This film simply presents facts about Mileva's life, the conclusions drawn are left to the opinions of the viewer. It is a beautifully told and very tragic story. A rare documentary on a rare subject.

Definitely worth a look.

This is a rare look at a fascinately woman, brilliant in her own right, hidden in the shadows of her husband's enormous notoriety. So often we never get a chance to hear of the woman behind the "great" man, but this documentary tells the story of the woman behind the Father of Modern Physics quite eloquently. Mileva's story makes one ponder the influence and effects one could have on their spouses' work and passions. It makes you wonder had Albert not been married to such a brilliant woman, would he have reached such excellence?

This story is a ghastly fanatsy, and undermines Mileva's true status as one of the earliest girls to insist on taking physics and then trying to make it despite so many

difficulties (none of which this film imagines).

The Product Description contains serious errors. It is not true that Einstein barely managed to pass his exams for the diploma course at Zurich Polytechnic. He came top of the six students in their group in the intermediate diploma exam. He neglected his studies after that to follow up his own researches on extra-curricular advanced physics, and came only fourth of the remaining five students for the final diploma exam in 1900, but in each of the four topics being examined he obtained at least grade 5 on a scale 1-6. Mileva Maric's grade for the intermediate exam placed her fifth out of six students, and in the final diploma exam in 1900, last out of five students, with a very poor 2.5 (scale 1-6) in the mathematics component, theory of functions. She was not pregnant at that time. It was when she failed at her second attempt the following year that she was some three months pregnant at the time of the exam.

The notion that the theory of special relativity was her doctoral thesis is absurd. There is no evidence that she ever had any particular interest in the electrodynamics of moving bodies, while Einstein mentions his ideas on this subject on numerous occasions in his letters to her from 1899 through 1901. The subject of Maric's diploma dissertation was heat conduction, which she hoped to work into a doctoral dissertation, but gave up on it in late 1901 a few months after her second failure to pass the diploma exam.

The film itself contains numerous other factual errors, some considerably more serious than those in the Product Description.