The Other Einstein

by Marie Benedict

German, the language spoken by those in power in Austro-Hungary.

She is from zagreb croatia

The Polytechnic was a new sort of college dedicated to producing teachers and professors for various math or scientific disciplines, and it was one of the few universities in Europe to grant women degrees.

Sye is fifth woman admitted. Sge meets al in class.

in Serbia, if a woman has a limp, she’s not suitable for marriage.”

Mitza’s home will be this home; her leg will make marriage—and children—impossible. Even the government recognizes this. Girls can’t even attend high school.”

With a leg like that, no one will claim her in marriage. This gives her license to pursue the intellectual gifts God has given her.

I was seventeen, and I had just left my first physics class at the all-male Royal Classical High School in Zagreb, where Papa managed to get me admitted after my time in Novi Sad, despite a law prohibiting Austro-Hungarian girls from attending high school, by applying successfully to the authorities for an exemption.

admiring the newfangled ladies’ suits that the affluent Zürich women had begun to wear. We approved of the fresh style of the fitted jacket over the trumpetlike skirt shape but decided that the cinched nature of the jacket on top of the mandatory corsets would make us uncomfortable for long hours of studying. No, we would remain with the more practical full-sleeved blouses tucked into bell-shaped skirts, always in somber colors to ensure that we were taken seriously by our professors and classmates.

Mr. Einstein loading tobacco into his yard-long pipe

He had not been specifically invited, but then, he never was. His violin playing was so full of virtuosic feeling that the girls grew to welcome him, even though they never quite got accustomed to his lack of explicit invitation.

I knew of no professional woman who was also married, so why should I begin with Mr. Einstein something that I could never finish?

They contain notes from Hurwitz’s lectures on differential equations and calculus. I think I captured Herzog’s talks about the strength of materials. I tried to get every scrap of Weber’s lectures on the qualities of heat. Oh, and I didn’t forget Fiedler’s lectures on projective geometry and number theory.”

Our credo was to trust simplicity above all else and eschew archaic complicated ideas when necessary. Something of which I had to remind Albert, with his tendency toward tangents, constantly.

“Why else would I have a pile of rejection letters sitting here before me? When every other one of our classmates has been working in their new positions for months?” Albert asked.

most Polytechnic graduates, not only those with physics degrees—secured their positions through the advocacy of professors and alumni, and none of the other professors seemed inclined to extend themselves for Albert either. His flagrant flouting of classroom attendance rules and his brashness with the professors when he actually chose to make an appearance made him unpopular among our instructors.

Skippped class a lot to read about new tgeories etc

Anti-Semitism was rampant throughout Germanic educational institutions. Still, it didn’t explain his string of Italian rejections, but I wouldn’t dare point out this inconsistency.

The gardens of Villa Carlotta

Lake como

train for a short ride to Chiavenna. Although the sky was darkening and I couldn’t observe the village in detail, Albert described it to me as a quaint, ancient place, tucked into a beautiful valley at the foot of the Alps.

Despising the militaristic culture prevailing in his hometown of Berlin, Albert had renounced his citizenship and was awaiting Swiss papers in its place. “You don’t look German either. You look Jewish.”

“We are off to the Splügen,” he announced. I clasped his hand in excitement. We’d often discussed the mad journey over the mountain pass that spanned Italy and Switzerland.

“Would you mind if I listed only my name as the author? I’m hoping that if Professor Weber reads it and becomes as impressed as I think he will, he will offer me a permanent job.” I didn’t answer. The thought of being expunged from the paper’s authorship bothered me; we had worked on it as equals. But if he was only showing it to the new Professor Weber to impress him and if we’d later submit it to journals with both our names, I could agree.

He knew that all my professional dreams were lost the minute I became pregnant; failing the exams was a secondary defeat.

Failed due to nausea etc from pregnancy

“Whore,” Mr. and Mrs. Einstein called me. Although both their signatures appeared on the letter, I knew that Mrs. Einstein was its author.

If he could not even scrape together enough money and time to visit me one train stop away when I’d traversed countries to see him, what type of commitment could I really expect from him?

He mever visits. She is pg. Wirried he will back out oc marriage

Since our student days had ended, trouble had reigned over our relationship, and Albert had disappointed me mightily with his mercurial treatment, with the endless waiting, and with his recalcitrance over Lieserl.

They dot wed until the baby is a yeR old. Albert made ger be apRt from it a lot

I tried not to think of the moment I handed Lieserl to Mama and left her behind for Zürich. I attempted to banish from my mind the four months after that I spent alone in Zürich at the Engelbrecht Pension, wandering aimlessly during the day and crying myself to sleep every night while I waited in vain for Albert to visit or summon me because he was too busy on hikes and sails with his new friends in the hours he had free from the patent office.

the original Mrs. Einstein. I shivered at the thought of her. She had continued her strident opposition to our marriage, despite Albert’s father’s deathbed approval, and even sent a damning missive as recently as this morning.

“Can’t your mother handle this? You could be away for an awfully long time. A proper wife shouldn’t leave her husband alone for too long. How will I manage?” I stared at him. Had he really just asked me those questions? For all his selfish inquiries, he hadn’t asked a single question about the scarlet fever or Lieserl’s condition. Where was his compassion and concern for his daughter?

If the train left the station at rapid speeds approaching the speed of light, the clock’s hands would still move, but the train would be moving so quickly that light could not catch up with it. The faster the train accelerated, the slower the hands would move, ultimately freezing once the train reached the speed of light. Time would effectively freeze. And if the train could go faster than the speed of light—an impossibility, but for argument’s sake, assumed—then time might roll backward. There it was. The new rule was so simple and natural. Newton’s laws about the physical universe only applied to inert objects. No one needed to be bound by the old rules anymore. Time was relative to space. Time was not absolute. Not when there is motion.

In ghr book she is the one who devjses this

“What is it, Dollie?” He sounded genuinely perplexed, as if he’d expected me to bustle in from the train station and whip up a four-course dinner with a radiant smile. “How can you not know?” I asked, not hiding my anger at his ignorance.

Returning from serbia after daughters death

“I think that the notion of relativity—the one we’ve read about in Mach and Poincaré—might hold the answer. Relativity might bridge the gap between the theories of Newton and Maxwell, the new and the old. But only if we shift our understanding of space and time.” I explained to him the thought experiment I’d had in the Novi Sad train station. “The logical outcome is that the measurements of certain quantities—such as time—are relative to the velocity or speed of the observer, particularly if we assume that the speed of light is fixed for all observers. Space and time should be considered together and in relation to each other. In this way, Newton’s classic laws of mechanical physics remain accurate but only in situations of uniform motion.”

you’re the mathematician in the family, not me. It’s you who I rely upon to correct my own numbers!” he cried out in mock exasperation.

For the past eighteen months, we’d been working on three papers, although the relativity paper was largely my own. The others—an article on the quantum of light and the photoelectric effect, and another article on Brownian motion and atomic theory—were coauthored by both of us. On those two, Albert primarily drafted the theory while I handled the mathematics, although I was intimately familiar with every word and idea.

“On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies.” Our names—Albert Einstein and Mileva Marić Einstein—shone beneath the title. The work was largely mine, but I understood that without my degree or doctorate, it must come with Albert’s name as well.

One of the editors of Annalen der Physik wrote me, asking questions about you and your credentials. I explained that you were my wife and fully trained as a physicist, even though you didn’t have your degree. In his reply, I sensed hesitation.” “Did he ask you to remove my name?” “No,” he said slowly. “You asked him to remove my name?” I was incredulous. But only in part. I suddenly remembered another time he’d removed my name from an article we’d coauthored.

unrolled the rough sketches I had made of the Maschinchen, primarily electrical formulas and circuitry diagrams.

A machone to measure small amounts of energy

painful omission of my name in our four 1905 papers in the Annalen der Physik—the relativity article in particular—my

“Why isn’t Mileva’s name on the patent filing?” Paul asked Albert, a quizzical expression on his face.

I conjectured that if I freed him from financial worry through the student boarders, he could begin theorizing again, and an invitation would ensue. It angered me that I had to take such measures, but there was no other avenue for me to return to science. But no true invitation came in the months after we completed our work on the Maschinchen. Albert was no longer available for collaboration, no matter how well I freed his time to focus.

fame had left Albert with little interest in his wife, that I worried his desire for notoriety would overtake any humanity remaining within him.

He was asked to be a junior physics professor at the University of Zürich after a protracted debate among the professors over his Jewish heritage and a rocky conclusion that he didn’t exhibit the more “troubling” Jewish traits.

“Go ahead, Mileva, send the letter. You create problems at the most important times in my life. First, by having a baby when I was about to get the patent office job, and now, just as I’m finally about to start my university professorship. You only ever think of yourself.”

Pssible affair or start of potential one

nominated him for the Nobel Prize based on the 1905 paper on special relativity. I lowered myself to the couch, my hand trembling. My paper was being nominated for the Nobel Prize?

Black industrial soot clogged the Prague air, and it settled on me like a deep depression.

Famously dorty aor

its ethnically Germanic rulers and elite, whose rumored dislike of Slavic people and Jews was confirmed from the start. The mounting political instability in Austro-Hungary of which Prague was a part,

When brown water began running from the taps in our apartment in the Smíchov district on Třebízského Street, I traipsed to a fountain up the street and hauled cooking water into our apartment, boiling it before use. When bedbugs and fleas infested our bedding, I made a grand show of heaping the beset items in a bonfire

“I knew it!” he said with a slap on his leg. “I reviewed some of his articles and knew Albert couldn’t manage all those mathematical calculations on his own. You were always better at math than him. Than most of us, actually.” I blushed. “Coming from the head of the Polytechnic math department, that’s quite a compliment. And here I am, just a housewife.” “The department chair could have been yours if this old man hadn’t stole you away from science,” Marcel said, nudging Albert. I laughed. It had been so long since someone thought of me as anything but Albert’s wife. His

Had I heard Albert correctly? Was he proposing that Marcel collaborate with him on the math for an expansion of my theory? “Would I have to do any of the physics?” “No. I will handle the physics, if you manage the math.” Marcel looked at Albert skeptically for a moment, as if he was trying to reconcile the irresponsible college student he’d once known with the successful physicist in front of him. “Please, I need you, Grossman,” Albert begged. Then, very pointedly, he stared at me. “Compared with this problem, the original theory of relativity is childish.”

I think of our trip to Wannsee last Easter and recall your words of love. Since I cannot have you, since you are a married man, can I at least share your science?

When the Nobel Prize committee was being petitioned to remove me from consideration in 1903, Pierre publicly lobbied for me. He insisted to influential people on the committee that I had originated our research, conceived the experiments, and generated the theories about the nature of radioactivity,

Marie curie was i leRnedwas polish and chanved name

“Whether Albert has championed your scientific efforts or not, he certainly supported mine. Did you know that he came to my defense last year when all that unpleasant business with my Nobel Prize arose?” Madame Curie paused, aware that further elaboration on her “unpleasant business” was unnecessary. Scientists worldwide had called her unfit for the Nobel Prize when her affair with married fellow scientist Paul Langevin became public.