Einstein in Love by Dennis Overbye, Viking, $27.95, ISBN
0670894303
TEN YEARS is a long, long time in publishing, but it’s time well spent
waiting for Dennis Overbye’s Einstein in Love. Overbye is deputy science
editor of The New York Times and wrote Lonely Hearts of the
Cosmos. A fly-on-the-wall account of modern cosmologists’ epic struggle to
make sense of the Universe, that book ranks as one of the best popular science
books ever written. A decade on, Overbye’s subject is Albert Einstein.
Can there be anything new to say about Einstein? Overbye doubted
it—until he stumbled into a debate at a scientific meeting on whether
Einstein had cheated his first wife, Mileva Maric, out of her share of the
credit for the special theory of relativity. To Overbye it was a revelation to
hear the God-like Einstein described as “a philanderer, a draft dodger, a flirt,
a hustler, an artist, an errant son, an egregious poet, and a scuffling
physicist”. “So the old boy had some juice in him after all,” realised Overbye,
and resolved to concentrate on Einstein’s disreputable early years.
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The cover of Einstein in Love features a photograph of a young
Einstein and a young Maric, implying that this is their love story. But, says
Overbye, throughout his life Einstein was in love with only one thing: physics.
The world thus gained the general theory of relativity—a sublime
illumination of the ultimate nature of gravity, space and time—but it was
a terrible misfortune for the women in his life.
Maric’s life is heartbreakingly sad. A Serb raised near Belgrade, she was
born with a congenital dislocated hip—a condition today easily corrected
in childhood. It condemned Maric to lameness. Desperate to be a
physicist—an extraordinary ambition in a woman of her time—she
arrived at Zurich’s Federal Polytechnic School in October 1900. There her “world
line” crossed a certain Albert Einstein’s.
As a woman, the odds were of course stacked against her. To succeed, Maric
needed to have a lot of talent and a lot of luck—the kind of luck Marie
Sklodowska had when she found an equal partner in Pierre Curie. But not only did
Maric not find an equal, she fell in love with a light so blindingly bright that
she was plunged into the deepest shadow as her dreams withered and died.
Abandoned with their children, she became morose and depressed. Einstein
cited this as his reason for seeking comfort with another, in an affair with his
cousin Elsa. It was a typical act of self-justification. He dehumanised her so
he could treat her appallingly without guilt—while he abhorred such
dehumanising behaviour in the outside world.
Overbye masterfully interweaves this tragic story with the story of
Einstein’s titanic struggles with general relativity and the quantum. Of all his
ideas, Einstein considered his quantum explanation of the photoelectric
effect—postulating that light was composed of quanta, later called
photons—as the most revolutionary.
Of general relativity, the great achievement of Einstein’s life, Overbye has
much to say. It is almost impossible to believe that Einstein built such an
edifice from the mere observation that a falling body is weightless and a
requirement that the laws of physics appear the same to all observers.
In writing Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos, Overbye could interview
the living participants in the cosmological quest. Here, he has to breathe life
into the complex personalities and events of a long-dead era—and he
succeeds.