We talked about Newton at dinner often. I liked his idea that everything in the universe, from apples to planets, obeyed the same unchanging laws. Not laws made by people, but laws inherent in nature. I thought I might find God in such laws.
I tried to submerge myself in pre-Einstein physics before I started the actual writing of this book, once I’d gained a fairly solid understanding of the path of Mileva’s life and how Albert wove in and out of her existence (sometimes like a steam engine!). I guessed that one of the more basic principles Mileva could have known at a young age was Newton’s Laws of Motion, and, from one of my sons who is an ardent fan of science, I was aware of an experiment that could make those laws accessible and attractive to younger children. So the principles and the experiment itself became part of a flashback that demonstrated, in part, how Mileva became the scientist she was. But the more I thought about those Newtonian principles, the more they seemed to fit the arc of Mileva’s life—she’d been proceeding along on the straight line of her life until Albert impressed his own force upon her path, changing its course—and those principles became the guiding quotes for the three parts of the book, as explained in the Epilogue.
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