Table of Contents
In 1896, two students entered the Swiss University, one of whom was Albert Einstein, who went on to become one of the greatest scientists we’ve ever had. The other student was Mileva Marić, a 20-year-old Serbian. Both of them studied Physics, taking some of the same courses and in many of those, getting comparable course results. They studied together, fell in love and eventually got married. After marriage, Albert Einstein became ‘THE’ Einstein after having found modern physics; however, that was not the case for his wife. Marić faced a lot of personal and professional setbacks, just as her career should’ve begun. Decades later, their letters, acquaintances’ memories and biographies were published. Ever since, scholars have been arguing about how much credit for Einstein’s contributions to physics should go to Marić.
Mileva Marić
Born in 1875 in Titel, Vojvodina, then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and now Serbia, Marić endured a shaky road as a girl wishing to study physics because education beyond four years of elementary school was reserved for men only. Seeing her potential, her father, Milos, sent her across the border where girls had the same educational rights as boys. Milos petitioned for Mileva to be accepted into the all-male Royal Classical Gymnasium. She was accepted and became one of the first women to sit in a high school physics lecture alongside her male peers. At the time, physics did not produce many female names.
Marić deserves recognition not only for her resistance to hardships and difficulties and daringly exploring the world of physics, but also for pioneering and opening the door for women after her. Eventually, she reached the Swiss Federal Polytechnic in Zurich where she was again the only woman in her class. Her presence at the university was exceptional and it was here that she met her husband, Einstein.
127 our experts are availableright now
The Letters
The letters translated by, Shawn Smith, not only give us a glimpse into their personal lives, but their intellectual development and the love and enthusiasm they shared for physics. The letters are evidence of the fact that the ideas presented by Einstein are a result of two genius minds and not one.
In one letter Einstein writes, ‘How happy and proud will I be when the two of us together will have brought our work on relative motion to a victorious conclusion!’
In another he writes, “I am very curious whether our conservative molecular force will hold good for gases as well”.
This can be seen in not one or two but many letters that Einstein has used words like “our investigation” , “our new study” ,”our view” , “our theory” and ”our paper’’. It is also claimed that when Einstein was addressing a group of Croatian intellectuals he said. “I need my wife as she solves all my mathematical problems for me.”
The latter letters show that Einstein was distinctive about his own work and collaborative work. In one of the letters he writes, “The local Prof Weber is very nice to me and shows interest in my investigations. I gave him our paper. If only we would soon have the good fortune to continue pursuing this lovely path together.” This clearly shows that he was talking about two different projects; his own investigation and his joint collaboration with Marić.
One of the most controversial claims made regarding this has been made by a Soviet physicist, Abraham Joffe. Desanka Trbuhovic-Gjuric writes in Marić’s biography that Joffe claims that he saw the original three submission papers of the 1905 theory of relativity paper and said they were signed Einstein-Marity. (Marity is the Hungarian variant of Marić.) However, Marity was removed from the final publication.
Even after all the letters being used as evidence and the incidences written by many writers such as the one written by the author Djordje Krstic, he recalled their son Hans Albert telling him about seeing the couple “work together in the evenings at the same table” the scholars and historians still argue about Marić‘s involvement and that whether she was a collaborator or not. Physics historian Alberto Martínez wrote, “I want her to be the secret collaborator. But we should set aside our speculative preferences and instead look at the evidence.” However, everyone agrees that she was a pioneer for women in sciences. The one thing that can be proven through all this is that the phrase ‘behind every successful man is a woman’ remains universal.
