The Other Einstein(79)

Zürich, Switzerland

Every body continues at rest or in motion in a straight line unless compelled to change by forces impressed upon it. I find this first law of motion, beautiful and profound, an elegant statement of one of God’s truths uncovered by man. In my youth, I perceived the tenet as applying solely to objects; only later did I realize that people operate according to this principle too. My childhood path—mathematician, scientist, loner—continued on a straight line until it was acted upon by a force. Albert was the force that impressed upon my straight path.

Albert’s force acted on me in accordance with the second law of motion. I became swept up in his direction and velocity, and his force became my own. As I took on the roles of his lover, the mother of his children, his wife, and his secret scientific partner, I allowed him to trim away all the parts that didn’t fit his mold. I expanded others to further his dreams for himself. I suffered silently when my desires did not match his. Like the sacrifice of my professional ambitions for his stellar rise. Like the surrender of my ability to keep Lieserl by my side.

Until I could stand Albert’s force no more. The third law of motion triggered, and I exerted a force equal in magnitude and opposite in direction to his. I took back the space that belonged to me. I left him.

Since then, I have stayed still, defying all the laws of motion. I have watched war come to Europe once, then twice, and during those times, I have taken the helping hand of my dear, prescient Helene when I needed it. Even when I had the Nobel Prize money Albert had promised me in our divorce to assist in the raising of my beautiful sons—my brilliant Hans Albert, who went on to become an engineer, and my poor Tete, who succumbed to mental illness—I have reclaimed my intellect and my scientific passion by tutoring promising young female scientists. The sort of girls that Lieserl might have been had she lived. The sort of girl I once was. Perhaps these girls will find the rest of God’s patterns in science and, one day, tell my story.

I have witnessed the rise of Albert as a secular saint. But never once have I desired to return to the role of his wife. I have only ever wanted to return to the role of Lieserl’s mother.

Which acts should I change to undo the death of Lieserl? Do I begin by altering the path of the innocent young university student? Do I need only return to the days at the Spire with my infant Lieserl when Albert summoned me? To the station where I missed my train? How can I find my way back to her?

Finally, though it is dark, I see. I see the clock. The train. And I understand.

I need not change any act. For I am the train. I am traveling faster than the speed of light, and the hands of the clock are rolling backward. I see my Lieserl.

Mitza





Author’s Note


I confess to beginning this book with only the most commonplace understanding of Albert Einstein and hardly any knowledge of his first wife, Mileva Mari?. In fact, I had never even heard of Mileva Mari? until I helped my son Jack with a report on the wonderful Scholastic children’s book Who Was Albert Einstein? and it mentioned briefly that Albert Einstein’s first wife was also a physicist.

I became intrigued. Who was this unknown woman, a physicist at a time when very few women had university educations? And what role might she have played in the great scientist’s discoveries?

When I first began researching Mileva, I learned that rather than being unknown as I had thought, she was the focal point of much debate in the physics community. The part she might have played in the formation of Albert’s groundbreaking theories in 1905 was hotly contested, particularly once a cache of letters between the couple from the years 1897 to 1903—when Mileva and Albert were university students together and first married—was discovered in the 1980s. In those letters, Albert and Mileva discussed projects they undertook together, and the letters caused ripples throughout the physics world. Was Mileva simply a sounding board for his brainstorms, as some scientists insisted? Did she only assist him with the complicated mathematical calculations, as others claimed? Or did she play a much more critical role, as a few physicists believed?

As I dug into Mileva’s history, I discovered that she was fascinating in her own right, not just as a footnote in Albert Einstein’s story. Her rise from the relative backwater of misogynistic Serbia to the all-male university physics and mathematics classrooms of Switzerland was nothing short of meteoric. To my mind, the question of what role she truly played in Albert’s “miracle year” of 1905 became an examination of how Mileva—after pregnancy, exam failure, and marriage—was forced to subsume her academic ambitions and intellect to Albert’s ascent. Her story was, in many ways, the story of many intelligent, educated women whose own aspirations were marginalized in favor of their spouses. I believed it was time that stories such as these were told.

Given the fresh light this story sheds on the famous Albert, readers of The Other Einstein may be curious as to precisely how much of the book is truth and how much is speculation. Whenever possible, in the overarching arc of the story—the dates, the places, the people—I attempted to stay as close to the facts as possible, taking necessary liberties for fictional purposes. As one example of these liberties, Mileva did not begin her residential stint in Zürich at the Engelbrecht Pension but found her way there through her friendships after staying at another pension, and thus, the scene with Mileva and her father meeting the Engelbrechts is entirely fictional, as are many of the early scenes between Mileva and her pension friends, although they could have well happened a bit later in her life. And, of course, there are other instances in which I imagined the details of events about which I knew the barest of facts. In order to make their own assessment about the actual lives of the people depicted in The Other Einstein, I invite readers to peruse the collection of papers and letters by and about Albert Einstein and Mileva Mari? that are posted online at the marvelous website http://einsteinpapers.press.princeton.edu.