Albert Einstein, Mileva Maric: The Love Letters

There can be no doubt about it .Mileva Maric(Marity)was a collaborator with Albert Einstein on one or more of the 4 1905 papers published by Max Planck in his German language journal.Her main contribution probably was in explaining to Albert the 1887 Michelson -Morley light refraction-reflection experimental results demonstrating that the speed of light had to be a constant.This would mean that there was no "ether" medium in which light would travel .Understanding these results are a necessary,but not sufficient, prerequisite to building a special or general theory of Relativity.Albert Einstein deliberately left out any reference to these results because he knew that it was Mileva who had helped him master this area of research.He wanted to pretend that he had reached his conclusions without resort to these extremely important empirical- experimental findings or any other empirical work.Albert Einstein was ,of course,the main author of the papers.His refusal to acknowledge her partial contribution means that Albert was a glory grabber in the same sense that Otto Hahn was in refusing to acknowledge the great aid of Lise Meitner in the discovery of nuclear fission.

This a nice collection of love letters between Albert Einstein and his first wife, Mileva Maric. If you don't know the rest of the tragic story (for her, anyway), it's just as well. It's enough to make you reflect on the amount of pain that love turn to hate can engender. They cover the period when he is getting his PhD, his first job at the patent office (which he was happy to get, by the way) in Zurich, and the birth of their first, but illegitimate child, a daughter named Lieserl, whose eventual whereabouts became a mystery (see the excellent Einstein's Daughter by Michele Zackheim for an exhaustive search for Lieserl). What is most intriguing about these letters is the number of times Einstein refers to "our" in his scientific work. He has never acknowledged Mileva's help, but I don't know how anyone can avoid the conclusion that she was a collaborator during the critical period leading up to 1905. Consider the following, in Einstein's own words: " . . . our work on relative motion . . . "(p. 39); "Don't [Mileva] forget to check on the extent to which glass conforms to the Dulong-Petit law." (p. 40); " . . .our theory of molecular forces . . ."(p. 45); " . . . enough empirical material for our investigation . . . "(p. 47); and "I gave him our paper" (p. 52). There are other references. Mileva has had her defenders in the last ten or fifteen years, but for the most part those who want to keep the Einstein myth alive that whatever he did, he did without any help have relegated her to the role of some sort of amanuensis and helpmeet. If the word "our" means what I think it means, she was a whole more than that.