Little was known of Einstein’s life, and even less of his first wife, Mileva Maricć, until their private letters were published in the late 80s as the Collected Papers of Albert Einstein.[break]
Einstein, the name synonymous with genius, had so far been considered a reclusive physicist who, with his elegant theories, had changed the way scientists viewed their understanding of the universe. With the publication of the private letters, the personhood of Einstein became a subject of controversy. Even as they illustrated the intelligence of both Albert and Mileva, they bared Albert as an intensely flawed human being.
But let us take a break from the latter periods and dip into the 54 select correspondences published as Albert Einstein, Mileva Maric: The Love Letters, exchanged during the period when both were students at the Swiss Federal Polytechnic and deeply in love with each other until the time they got married in 1903.
The collection starts in 1897 with Mileva’s letter to young Albert soon after their friendship began. Albert is only 18 years old, a second-year student, and very enthusiastic about his classes. Mileva, the only female student in her university class, three-and-a-half years older than him, is independent and as fascinated by her studies. She writes to him about a lecture explaining the relationship between the mean velocity of a molecule and the average distance traversed by its collisions. He writes to her about his doubts regarding the concept of ether motion and his idea about the effect of relative motion with respect to the ether on light propagation. They serve as sounding boards for each other’s opinions on topics of physics but mostly they write sentimental things that young people in love write.
Einstein addresses Mileva as his “Dollie” and she calls him her “Johnnie.” He even springs rhymes and quartets for her – “But I scribble on without a rest/ So Dollie may read with interest!” and sends her a drawing of his foot that she asked for so she could knit him a pair of socks. Later, when he gets a job at the Patent Office in Bern and finds a place for them to live after they are married, he sends her a drawing of the floor plan. The plan is labeled neatly in Greek symbols like mathematical diagrams akin to the ones used to make calculations simpler. There is a legend to go with the drawing which explains what the symbols stand for (e.g., gamma means for Will you look at that!)
The volume of Albert’s letters in the collection outweighs that of Mileva’s. The editors state that he might have discarded them. From the few that have been published, we learn about the young, intelligent woman who had so far been almost forgotten by history. Her correspondence begins with youthful confidence, sassy in tone and illustrating her sharp intellect. Einstein calls her “a creature who is my equal, and who is as strong and independent as I am.”
We meet her as a strong, independent woman but her confidence wavers when she retakes her teaching certificate exams and fails. We also learn that she was pregnant with Albert’s illegitimate child, and even though she had baby Lieserl, there is no mention of the baby after 1903. Most critics assume that she was probably given up for adoption. Other critics state that he was a terrible father for having given up the child and for not having gone to see her even once. To be fair, his letter of 4 February 1902 suggests that he might have genuinely wanted to visit his family but was unable to do so because he could not afford to. He was still looking for work in order to be able to marry Mileva and support his family, and was willing to take up any job.
Besides the love story, we learn of Albert’s avid interest in contemporary ideas, his healthy disregard for published theories, the questions that led him to form his own ideas and later to connect topics that had till then been considered disparate. He had a healthy disregard for authority, including that of his mother, who opposed his marriage to Mileva, and of his professor, whom he later suspected of sabotaging his chances of getting a decent job. We learn that he wasn’t such a recluse but rather a young man too occupied with his subjects of affection, even though after 1903, when the letters in this collection end, his affection of physics outlasted his affection for any one person.
The love story of the Einsteins does not have a happily-ever-after end but The Love Letters collection stops where most fairytales do. They get married. Still, regardless of how the story goes, it is a book worth reading to get an insight into the workings of a curious mind and the development of the ideas that later became the foundations of Einstein’s famous papers of 1905.
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