Walter Isaacson Great Innovators e-book boxed set: Steve Jobs, Benjamin Franklin, Einstein

by Isaacson, Walter

Mileva Mari

  Mileva Mari was the first and favorite child of an ambitious Serbian peasant who had joined the army, married into modest wealth, and then dedicated himself to making sure that his brilliant daughter was able to prevail in the male world of math and physics. She spent most of her childhood in Novi Sad, a Serbian city then held by Hungary,28 and attended a variety of ever more demanding schools, at each of which she was at the top of her class, culminating when her father convinced the all-male Classical Gymnasium in Zagreb to let her enroll. After graduating there with the top grades in physics and math, she made her way to Zurich, where she became, just before she turned 21, the only woman in Einstein’s section of the Polytechnic.

  More than three years older than Einstein, afflicted with a congenital hip dislocation that caused her to limp, and prone to bouts of tuberculosis and despondency, Mileva Mari was known for neither her looks nor her personality. “Very smart and serious, small, delicate, brunette, ugly,” is how one of her female friends in Zurich described her.

  But she had qualities that Einstein, at least during his romantic scholar years, found attractive: a passion for math and science, a brooding depth, and a beguiling soul. Her deep-set eyes had a haunting intensity, her face an enticing touch of melancholy.29 She would become, over time, Einstein’s muse, partner, lover, wife, bête noire, and antagonist, and she would create an emotional field more powerful than that of anyone else in his life. It would alternately attract and repulse him with a force so strong that a mere scientist like himself would never be able to fathom it.

  They met when they both entered the Polytechnic in October 1896, but their relationship took a while to develop. There is no sign, from their letters or recollections, that they were anything more than classmates that first academic year. They did, however, decide to go hiking together in the summer of 1897. That fall, “frightened by the new feelings she was experiencing” because of Einstein, Mari decided to leave the Polytechnic temporarily and instead audit classes at Heidelberg University.30

  Her first surviving letter to Einstein, written a few weeks after she moved to Heidelberg, shows glimmers of a romantic attraction but also highlights her self-confident nonchalance. She addresses Einstein with the formal Sie in German, rather than the more intimate du. Unlike Marie Winteler, she teasingly makes the point that she has not been obsessing about him, even though he had written an unusually long letter to her. “It’s now been quite a while since I received your letter,” she said, “and I would have replied immediately and thanked you for the sacrifice of writing four long pages, would have also told of the joy you provided me through our trip together, but you said I should write to you someday when I happened to be bored. And I am very obedient, and I waited and waited for boredom to set in; but so far my waiting has been in vain.”

  Distinguishing Mari even more from Marie Winteler was the intellectual intensity of her letters. In this first one, she enthused over the lectures she had been attending of Philipp Lenard, then an assistant professor at Heidelberg, on kinetic theory, which explains the properties of gases as being due to the actions of millions of individual molecules. “Oh, it was really neat at the lecture of Professor Lenard yesterday,” she wrote. “He is talking now about the kinetic theory of heat and gases. So, it turns out that the molecules of oxygen move with a velocity of over 400 meters per second, then the good professor calculated and calculated . . . and it finally turned out even though molecules do move with this velocity, they travel a distance of only 1/100 of a hairbreadth.”

  Kinetic theory had not yet been fully accepted by the scientific establishment (nor, for that matter, had even the existence of atoms and molecules), and Mari’s letter indicated that she did not have a deep understanding of the subject. In addition, there was a sad irony: Lenard would be one of Einstein’s early inspirations but later one of his most hateful anti-Semitic tormentors.

  Mari also commented on ideas Einstein had shared in his earlier letter about the difficulty mortals have in comprehending the infinite. “I do not believe that the structure of the human brain is to be blamed for the fact that man cannot grasp infinity,” she wrote. “Man is very capable of imagining infinite happiness, and he should be able to grasp the infinity of space—I think that should be much easier.” There is a slight echo of Einstein’s escape from the “merely personal” into the safety of scientific thinking: finding it easier to imagine infinite space than infinite happiness.

  Yet Mari was also, it is clear from her letter, thinking of Einstein in a more personal way. She had even talked to her adoring and protective father about him. “Papa gave me some tobacco to take with me and I was supposed to hand it to you personally,” she said. “He wanted so much to whet your appetite for our little land of outlaws. I told him all about you—you must absolutely come back with me someday. The two of you would really have a lot to talk about!” The tobacco, unlike Marie Winteler’s teapot, was a present Einstein would likely have wanted, but Mari teased that she wasn’t sending it.“You would have to pay duty on it, and then you would curse me.”31

  That conflicting admixture of playfulness and seriousness, of insouciance and intensity, of intimacy and detachment—so peculiar yet also so evident in Einstein as well—must have appealed to him. He urged her to return to Zurich. By February 1898, she had made up her mind to do so, and he was thrilled. “I’m sure you won’t regret your decision,” he wrote. “You should come back as soon as possible.”

  He gave her a thumbnail of how each of the professors was performing (admitting that he found the one teaching geometry to be “a little impenetrable”), and he promised to help her catch up with the aid of the lecture notes he and Marcel Grossmann had kept. The one problem was that she would probably not be able to get her “old pleasant room” at the nearby pension back. “Serves you right, you little runaway!”32

  By April she was back, in a boarding house a few blocks from his, and now they were a couple. They shared books, intellectual enthusiasms, intimacies, and access to each other’s apartments. One day, when he again forgot his key and found himself locked out of his own place, he went to hers and borrowed her copy of a physics text. “Don’t be angry with me,” he said in the little note he left her. Later that year, a similar note left for her added, “If you don’t mind, I’d like to come over this evening to read with you.”33

  Friends were surprised that a sensuous and handsome man such as Einstein, who could have almost any woman fall for him, would find himself with a short and plain Serbian who had a limp and exuded an air of melancholy. “I would never be brave enough to marry a woman unless she were absolutely healthy,” a fellow student said to him. Einstein replied, “But she has such a lovely voice.”34

  Einstein’s mother, who had adored Marie Winteler, was similarly dubious about the dark intellectual who had replaced her. “Your photograph had quite an effect on my old lady,” Einstein wrote from Milan, where he was visiting his parents during spring break of 1899. “While she studied it carefully, I said with the deepest sympathy: ‘Yes, yes, she certainly is a clever one.’ I’ve already had to endure much teasing about this.”35

  It is easy to see why Einstein felt such an affinity for Mari. They were kindred spirits who perceived themselves as aloof scholars and outsiders. Slightly rebellious toward bourgeois expectations, they were both intellectuals who sought as a lover someone who would also be a partner, colleague, and collaborator. “We understand each other’s dark souls so well, and also drinking coffee and eating sausages, etcetera,” Einstein wrote her.

  He had a way of making the etcetera sound roguish. He closed another letter: “Best wishes etc., especially the latter.” After being apart for a few weeks, he listed the things he liked to do with her: “Soon I’ll be with my sweetheart again and can kiss her, hug her, make coffee with her, scold her, study with her, laugh with her, walk with her, chat with her, and ad infinitum!” They took pride in sharing a quirkiness. “I’m the same old rogue as I’ve always been,”
he wrote, “full of whims and mischief, and as moody as ever!”36

  Above all, Einstein loved Mari for her mind. “How proud I will be to have a little Ph.D. for a sweetheart,” he wrote to her at one point. Science and romance seemed to be interwoven. While on vacation with his family in 1899, Einstein lamented in a letter to Mari, “When I read Helmholtz for the first time I could not—and still cannot—believe that I was doing so without you sitting next to me. I enjoy working together and I find it soothing and also less boring.”

  Indeed, most of their letters mixed romantic effusions with scientific enthusiasms, often with an emphasis on the latter. In one letter, for example, he foreshadowed not only the title but also some of the concepts of his great paper on special relativity. “I am more and more convinced that the electrodynamics of moving bodies as it is presented today does not correspond to reality and that it will be possible to present it in a simpler way,” he wrote. “The introduction of the term ‘ether’ into theories of electricity has led to the conception of a medium whose motion can be described without, I believe, being able to ascribe physical meaning to it.”37

  Even though this mix of intellectual and emotional companionship appealed to him, every now and then he recalled the enticement of the simpler desire represented by Marie Winteler. And with the tactlessness that masqueraded for him as honesty (or perhaps because of his puckish desire to torment), he let Mari know it. After his 1899 summer vacation, he decided to take his sister to enroll in school in Aarau, where Marie lived. He wrote Mari to assure her that he would not spend much time with his former girlfriend, but the pledge was written in a way that was, perhaps intentionally, more unsettling than reassuring. “I won’t be going to Aarau as often now that the daughter I was so madly in love with four years ago is coming back home,” he said. “For the most part I feel quite secure in my high fortress of calm. But I know that if I saw her a few more times, I would certainly go mad. Of that I am certain, and I fear it like fire.”

  But the letter goes on, happily for Mari, with a description of what they would do when they met back in Zurich, a passage in which Einstein showed once again why their relationship was so special. “The first thing we’ll do is climb the Ütliberg,” he said, referring to a high point just out of town. There they would be able to “take pleasure in unpacking our memories” of the things they had done together on other hiking trips. “I can already imagine the fun we will have,” he wrote. Finally, with a flourish only they could have fully appreciated, he concluded, “And then we’ll start in on Helmholtz’s electromagnetic theory of light.”38

  In the ensuing months, their letters became even more intimate and passionate. He began calling her Doxerl (Dollie), as well as “my wild little rascal” and “my street urchin”; she called him Johannzel (Johnnie) and “my wicked little sweetheart.” By the start of 1900, they were using the familiar du with one another, a process that began with a little note from her that reads, in full:

  My little Johnnie,

  Because I like you so much, and because you’re so far away that I can’t give you a little kiss, I’m writing this letter to ask if you like me as much as I do you? Answer me immediately.

  A thousand kisses from your Dollie39

  Graduation, August 1900

  Academically, things were also going well for Einstein. In his intermediate exams in October 1898, he had finished first in his class, with an average of 5.7 out of a possible 6. Finishing second, with a 5.6, was his friend and math note-taker Marcel Grossmann.40

  To graduate, Einstein had to do a research thesis. He initially proposed to Professor Weber that he do an experiment to measure how fast the earth was moving through the ether, the supposed substance that allowed light waves to propagate through space. The accepted wisdom, which he would famously destroy with his special theory of relativity, was that if the earth were moving through this ether toward or away from the source of a light beam, we’d be able to detect a difference in the observed speed of the light.

  During his visit to Aarau at the end of his summer vacation of 1899, he worked on this issue with the rector of his old school there. “I had a good idea for investigating the way in which a body’s relative motion with respect to the ether affects the velocity of the propagation of light,” he wrote Mari. His idea involved building an apparatus that would use angled mirrors “so that light from a single source would be reflected in two different directions,” sending one part of the beam in the direction of the earth’s movement and the other part of the beam perpendicular to it. In a lecture on how he discovered relativity, Einstein recalled that his idea was to split a light beam, reflect it in different directions, and see if there was “a difference in energy depending on whether or not the direction was along the earth’s motion through the ether.” This could be done, he posited, by “using two thermoelectric piles to examine the difference of the heat generated in them.”41

  Weber rejected the proposal. What Einstein did not fully realize was that similar experiments had already been done by many others, including the Americans Albert Michelson and Edward Morley, and none had been able to detect any evidence of the perplexing ether—or that the speed of light varied depending on the motion of the observer or the light source. After discussing the topic with Weber, Einstein read a paper delivered the previous year by Wilhelm Wien, which briefly described thirteen experiments that had been conducted to detect the ether, including the Michelson-Morley one.

  Einstein sent Professor Wien his own speculative paper on that topic and asked him to write him back. “He’ll write me via the Polytechnic,” Einstein predicted to Mari. “If you see a letter there for me, you may go ahead and open it.” There is no evidence that Wien ever wrote back.42

  Einstein’s next research proposal involved exploring the link between the ability of different materials to conduct heat and to conduct electricity, something that was suggested by the electron theory. Weber apparently did not like that idea either, so Einstein was reduced, along with Mari, to doing a study purely on heat conduction, which was one of Weber’s specialties.

  Einstein later dismissed their graduation research papers as being of “no interest to me.” Weber gave Einstein and Mari the two lowest essay grades in the class, a 4.5 and a 4.0, respectively; Grossmann, by comparison, got a 5.5. Adding annoyance to that injury, Weber said that Einstein had not written his on the proper regulation paper, and he forced him to copy the entire essay over again.43

  Despite the low mark on his essay, Einstein was able to eke by with a 4.9 average in his final set of grades, placing him fourth in his class of five. Although history refutes the delicious myth that he flunked math in high school, at least it does offer as a consolation the amusement that he graduated college near the bottom of his class.

  At least he graduated. His 4.9 average was just enough to let him get his diploma, which he did officially in July 1900. Mileva Mari, however, managed only a 4.0, by far the lowest in the class, and was not allowed to graduate. She determined that she would try again the following year.44

  Not surprisingly, Einstein’s years at the Polytechnic were marked by his pride at casting himself as a nonconformist. “His spirit of independence asserted itself one day in class when the professor mentioned a mild disciplinary measure just taken by the school’s authorities,” a classmate recalled. Einstein protested. The fundamental requirement of education, he felt, was the “need for intellectual freedom.”45

  Throughout his life, Einstein would speak lovingly of the Zurich Polytechnic, but he also would note that he did not like the discipline that was inherent in the system of examinations. “The hitch in this was, of course, that one had to cram all this stuff into one’s mind for the examinations, whether one liked it or not,” he said. “This coercion had such a deterring effect that, after I had passed the final examination, I found the consideration of any scientific problems distasteful to me for an entire year.”46

  In reality, that was neither possible nor true. H
e was cured within weeks, and he ended up taking with him some science books, including texts by Gustav Kirchhoff and Ludwig Boltzmann, when he joined his mother and sister later that July for their summer holiday in the Swiss Alps. “I’ve been studying a great deal,” he wrote Mari, “mainly Kirch-hoff ’s notorious investigations of the motion of the rigid body.” He admitted that his resentment over the exams had already worn off. “My nerves have calmed down enough so that I’m able to work happily again,” he said. “How are yours?”47

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE LOVERS

  1900–1904

  With Mileva and Hans Albert Einstein, 1904

  Summer Vacation, 1900

  Newly graduated, carrying his Kirchhoff and other physics books, Einstein arrived at the end of July 1900 for his family’s summer vacation in Melchtal, a village nestled in the Swiss Alps between Lake Lucerne and the border with northern Italy. In tow was his “dreadful aunt,” Julia Koch. They were met at the train station by his mother and sister, who smothered him with kisses, and then all piled into a carriage for the ride up the mountain.

  As they neared the hotel, Einstein and his sister got off to walk. Maja confided that she had not dared to discuss with their mother his relationship with Mileva Mari, known in the family as “the Dollie affair” after his nickname for her, and she asked him to “go easy on Mama.” It was not in Einstein’s nature, however, “to keep my big mouth shut,” as he later put it in his letter to Mari about the scene, nor was it in his nature to protect Mari’s feelings by sparing her all the dramatic details about what ensued.1

  He went to his mother’s room and, after hearing about his exams, she asked him, “So, what will become of your Dollie now?”

  “My wife,” Einstein answered, trying to affect the same nonchalance that his mother had used in her question.