Einstein (10 page)

Whoever was to blame, if either, it was not surprising that they ended up on different paths. After her relationship with Einstein ended, Marie lapsed into a nervous depression, often missing days of teaching, and a few years later married the manager of a watch factory. Einstein, on the other hand, rebounded from the relationship by
falling into the arms of someone who was just about as different from Marie as could be imagined.

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