Mileva's Work
by Marija Lubardić
In August 1899, Albert wrote to Mileva: “when I read Helmholtz for the first time, it seemed so odd that you were not by my side and today, this is not getting better. I find the work we do together very good, healing and also easier.”
Mileva Marić was a Serbian mathematician and physicist, as well as a coworker and wife of Albert Einstein, whose work certainly contributed to her husband’s scientific discoveries. Inspired by the Nobel For Mileva campaign, and the fact that I come from the same country as this extraordinary scientist, I felt the need to write a blog post about her collaboration with Albert, without disputing the quality of Einstein's work.
Mileva Marić was born in Titel, Serbia in 1875. In 1896, as a brilliant student, she enrolled in medicine at the University of Zurich, and in the same year she transferred to the Federal Polytechnic School, where she studied physics and mathematics. Although the institution had existed for forty years at the time, Mileva was only the fifth woman to be accepted. One of her classmates was Albert Einstein. In the subsequent years, Mileva and Albert’s academic and romantic relationship developed then in 1903, despite the opposition of his parents on religious grounds, they got married.
During their time together Mileva moved her life from Zurich to Heidelberg and back to Zurich again to continue her studies but despite this didn’t complete her doctorate. In the periods of time when they were separated because of Einstein's teaching duties, acknowledging her emotional support, Albert wrote: “When I'm not with you I feel as if I'm not whole. When I sit, I want to walk; when I walk, I’m looking forward to going home; when I’m amusing myself, I want to study; when I study, I can’t sit still and concentrate; and when I go to sleep, I’m not satisfied with how I spent the day”.
During the marriage Mileva and Albert had two sons, Hans Albert and Eduard and they separated in 1914, with Mileva taking the boys and returning to Zurich from Berlin then they divorced five years later in 1919. However, the question arises as to how and to what extent Mileva contributed to the scientific discoveries attributed to her husband Albert.
Mileva attended the winter semester of 1897 in Heidelberg, listening to lectures by Professor Philipp Lenard, who was the winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1905. Listening to Lenard, Mileva studied the photoelectric effect and was delighted with what she learned about the speed of atoms and the distances at which their collisions occur. The laws of photoelectric effect were exactly the subject of Einstein's work for which he won the Nobel Prize in 1921. At the very least, it can be suspected that Mileva was participating in defining the laws of photoelectric effect, and the fact that Albert gave Mileva the entire amount of money he received by winning the Nobel Prize can be taken as an argument for this theory. Money she later used to pay for curing their son Hans Albert’s Schizophrenia.
In one of his letters to Mileva, Albert wrote: “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 letter Einstein said: “I am very curious whether our conservative molecular force will hold good for gases as well.” On many different occasions, Einstein continued to write to Maric mentioning “our new studies”, “our investigations”, “our view”, “our theory” and “our paper”. It is claimed when addressing a group of intellectuals, Einstein said: “I need my wife as she solves all the mathematical problems for me.” In another letter, Einstein said: “For the investigation of the Thomson effect I have again resorted to another method, which has some similarities with yours for the determination of the dependence of K (equilibrium constant) on T(temperature)”.
It is very doubtful that Einstein would be writing to Marić about the Thomson effect, methods and laboratory equipment if she was not competent enough to receive and understand such information.
The Soviet physicist Abraham Joffe says that he saw the original three submission papers of the 1905 Theory of Relativity and claimed they were signed Einstein-Marity, Marity being the Hungarian variant of Marić.
Although the precise facts and evidence around their academic relationship are patchy what is quite clear is that there was cooperation and that Mileva’s work has gone unrecognised for far too long and through the #NobelForMileva campaign we want to make sure we are shining a light on her and all her achievements.