Einstein In Love

By Dennis Overbye

Albert Einstein, conceivably the last good man in this deconstructed century of failed gods and crumpled myths, is in woman trouble. A small band of scholars is claiming that much of the early work that made him famous, including, perhaps, the theory of relativity, should have been credited to his wife. The accusation would sound comical if it weren't tragic. This is Einstein, our most revered symbol of genius. We've all grown up with the vision of the humble patent examiner who overturned physics, with his corona of white hair and the sad deep eyes that have seen further than you can look. In our minds he floats like a sockless tumbleweed above the grit of mundane life. Behind the face we all recognize is a man we do not know.

Even physicists fall in love. If I were casting her in a movie, I would pick someone dark and sultry like Marlee Matlin, a little mysterious with an angry, damaged air. She has a slight limp -- do we know why? A childhood accident? Family tragedy? Does he find it sexy, affecting? Mileva Maric was a dark- haired Serbian woman who dreamed of being a physicist, a pre-feminist fighter, 21 when she entered the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. There she met Albert Einstein, a 17-year-old bohemian with thick curly hair and dark, warm eyes, bedroom eyes. They became lovers, sharing classes, textbooks and his father's disapproval. In 1902 they had an illegitimate daughter, who disappeared. Albert and Mileva married. Revolution was in the air, and they were the first modern couple. For pillow talk they had electrodynamics and atomic kinetics. In 1905 Einstein published a trio of brilliant papers in a single issue of the journal Annalen der Physik, among them the theory of relativity with its subversive notions of elastic space- time and interchangeable matter and energy. Another elucidated the quantum theory of light; still another a proof of the existence of atoms. You could say the 20th century was born in those pages.

His fame rocketed. She sank into his shadow, a housewife with two sons to raise, while he pursued general relativity -- the notion that gravity could be explained as "curved" space-time. They separated in 1914 and eventually divorced. As part of his alimony, he promised his future Nobel Prize money and delivered three years later. Einstein remarried and moved to America. Mileva and the kids were on their own. One son died in a mental institution, unvisited by his father; the other became an engineering professor. Mileva died in 1948, never having published a scientific paper under her own name.

The movie ends, a bitter drama. Einstein's biographers brushed her off as a gloomy Slav and a sloppy housekeeper, not quite bright enough to follow her husband into the new world of relativity, as if she deserved obscurity.

In 1987 his letters to her were published. Yes, love letters. But at least some of the language in those letters makes Albert and Mileva sound like research partners: "How happy and proud," he wrote in 1901, "I will be when the two of us together will have brought our work on the relative motion ((relativity)) to a victorious conclusion!" Our work?

The idea of Mileva as collaborator can be made to fit like a key into certain puzzles, such as why Einstein never explained where he got the idea for relativity. Meanwhile, Mileva Maric had to be anything but a dunce in order to get into the Swiss Polytechnic, the M.I.T. of Central Europe. The most provocative piece of evidence is also the most disputed. According to a Yugoslav biography of Maric, Russian physicist Abram Joffe, now dead, claimed that he had seen the original 1905 papers and that they were signed Einstein- Maric. If so, those were the only ones she ever signed.

Is this enough to rewrite history? Was Einstein a fraud or just a lousy husband? Would that we could decide. Consider the psychohistorical fun scholars could have with the implications that a woman discovered relativity -- does it have anything to do with the traditional female emphasis on relationships and distrust of male absolutes? The Einstein experts are unconvinced. At worst, they say, Einstein was a lousy husband. The fact is that we will never know; Albert and Mileva have fallen into some Pynchonesque black hole of history that claims the dead. The longer we think about them, the more uncertain everything becomes. Einstein will forever after be a little more mortal, and that's good.

Women have suffered a double blow from the Einstein fiasco. First a possible heroine and role model, Mileva Maric, was lost. Then the agent of that loss was turned around and used as a club against them. Einstein's legacy was style as much as substance. The absentminded, frizzed-out dreamer has become the archetype of male genius. "Don't bother Daddy. He's busy working on the space-time continuum." Substitute "novel," "fast ball" or "takeover plan" for the end of that statement, and you have the image of the lone genius. Genius needs a little slack; we all want to be Einstein. In Western civilization, a man is not a man who is not stiff-arming some woman who wants a commitment and riding alone into the sunset to Do What He Must Do, leaving her behind to clean up -- and show up with hot soup when things get really bad.

Every revolution has limits. Einstein was an ordinary man. He could see past space and time, yes, but not sex. Not all Einstein's learning nor his liberalism could keep him from making of Mileva what every other man made of his woman: a housewife, helpmate and addendum to his own identity.

So let us not mourn the loss of a plaster saint. That saint, the venerated one with the windblown corona, was a dried husk. The man who had the great thoughts and spun the strange theories that inspired that veneration was young, full of vigor and turbulence and passion. He was hardly alone; all his organs worked as well as his brain. His household was squirming with babies when he began his greatest work, on general relativity. Einstein's physics flourished not in the absence of life but in its fullness. His scientific life blossomed at the same time as the rest of his life. When he was in love.