John Stachel examines the claims about Abraham Joffe
in his Introduction to Einstein's
Miraculous Year: Five Papers that Changed the Face of Physics, Princeton
University Press, 2005, pp. liv-lxxii
APPENDIX
Now I must
reluctantly turn to the claim, cited at the beginning of the last section, that
"Maric [sic],
a brilliant mathematician, collaborated with [Einstein] on three famous works:
Brownian Motion, Special Relativity Theory and
Photoelectric Effect." Believe me, it is not with any pleasure that I turn
to this task. I am fully aware of the truth in the observation of a
nineteenth-century Danish diplomat "Denials never have the charm or the
impact of false reports." But this book would not appear in Einstein's
name alone if there were any credible evidence for such claims.
The claim
that "Maric [was] a brilliant
mathematician" must be set against the fact that she took the final
examinations at the Poly twice, and each time failed because of her low grades
in mathematics. But this would be beside the point if we had any evidence that
she "collaborated with [Einstein] on three famous works: Brownian Motion, Special Relativity Theory and Photoelectric
Effect." The only evidence offered for the claim on the PBS Web site is
the following statement:
But there is at least one printed
report in which Joffe ["Abram Joffe (Ioffe), a respected member
of the Soviet Academy of Sciences"] declared that he personally saw the
names of two authors on the 1905 papers: Einstein and Marity
(a Hungarianized form of Maric).[116]
What
evidence is given for this claim? On the same page of the Web site is an
illustration of a part of a text in Russian, with the caption: "Old Russian journal citing
Einstein‑Marity (Maric)
as co-authors of the 1905 papers." No sources are cited for this claim
beyond the illustration.
In fact, the illustration is not from an article by Joffe, not from
"an old Russian journal," and does not cite Einstein and Marić as "co-authors of the 1905 papers."
The printed report" by Joffe is a 1955 article
in the Soviet journal Uspekhi
fizicheskikh nauk,[117] which also
does not cite Einstein and Marić
as "co‑authors of the 1905 papers."
The illustration is actually from page
57 of a popular-science book by Daniil Semenovich Danin, Neizbezhnost strannogo mira, published
in 1962 by the Molodaia Gvardii
[Young Guard] publishers in
The unsuccessful teacher, who, in
search of a reasonable income, had become a third class engineering expert in
the Swiss Patent Office, this yet completely unknown theoretician in 1905
published three articles in the same volume of the famous "Annalen der Physik"
signed "Einstein-Marity" (or Marić
– which was his first wife's family name).
This English translation is taken from
a book by Christopher Jon Bjerknes.[118]
The Russian text is reproduced on page 196 of the book, and comparison with the
illustration on the Web site, which is the same as that used on the PBS
television program, establishes that this is indeed the "old Russian
journal" cited.
Now, the articles were presumably not
signed "Einstein-Marity" and Einstein-Marić –
so which was it? Danin obviously has no clue how they
were signed. He is merely amplifying a story picked up somewhere else – indeed
from Joffe, as we shall see in a moment. As far as I
know, Danin's text was first cited in print in
connection with a discussion of Einstein and Marić
by Margarete Maurer.[119] Neither Bjerknes nor Maurer can be regarded as biased in favor of Albert Einstein (I would say quite the contrary),
but she states, "The page copied from Danin's
work still does not indeed represent a historical 'proof,'" and proceeds
to suggest that it probably originated from Joffe's
reminiscences, which were not available to her at the time.
Indeed, if
one looks at the passage from Joffe, it is clear that
it is the source of Danin's assertions, so let us
turn to this passage. In English translation, it reads:
For physics and especially for the
physics of my generation – that of Einstein's contemporaries, Einstein's
entrance into the arena of science is unforgettable. In 1905, three articles
appeared in the "Annalen der
Physik", which began three very important branches
of 20th century physics. Those were the theory of Brownian motion, the photon
theory of light, and the theory of relativity. The author of these articles –
an unknown person at that time, was a bureaucrat at the Patent Office in
Again, the
translation (slightly modified in the descriptions of the three papers) is from
the book by Bjerknes, pages 195-196; the Russian
original is given on page 196. We see that all Danin
adds to the statements by Joffe is the wel-lknown fact that Einstein was a third class engineering
expert at the Patent Office; and the addition after Einstein-Marity, "(or Marić -- which was his
first wife's family name)," a circumstance to which we shall return below.
Why did the
producers of the PBS show and the authors of the Web site choose to show an
excerpt from Danin and not from Joffe?
One can only speculate; but it is noteworthy that, although he says nothing
about two authors, Danin does use the phrase
"signed" while Joffe does not. The text
cited above is all there is in the
original article by Joffe that bears on the question
of authorship of the three 1905 articles. To summarize, he states that their author
was someone working at the Swiss Patent Office, whose name was "Einstein-Marity (note again that the phrase "or Marić" does not occur in Joffe).
All further
claims about Joffe on the PBS program and Web site
are actually based on the assertions of Desanka Trbuhović-Gjurić
in her biography of Marić:
The distinguished Russian physicist
Abraham F. Joffe (1880-1960) pointed out in his "In Remembrance of Albert Einstein"
that Einstein's three epochal articles in Volume 17 of "Annalen der Physik"
of 1905 were originally signed
"Einstein-Marić.[120]
Note that
this is not what Joffe says, which is:
"The author of these articles… was… Einstein-Marity." He makes no claim about the signature,
and certainly not about having seen the original signature. But let us
go on with the quotation from Trbuhović-Gjurić:
Joffe had seen the originals as Assistent to Röntgen, who
belonged to the Board of the "Annalen,"
which had examined submitted contributions for editorial purposes. Röntgen showed his summa
cum laude student this work, and Joffe thereby
came face to face with the manuscripts, which are no longer available today.[121]
Trbuhović-Gjurić offers no documentation of,
or other justification for, her two claims that (1) Röntgen
had the original manuscripts, and that (2) he then showed them to Joffe; nor, when she was later interviewed by Robert Schulmann, one of the editors of the Einstein Papers, was
she able to offer any further evidence beyond the reference to a microfilm of
an article, which her son subsequently stated was the "article" by Danin (see the discussion in Maurer, cited above). Note
that, if the first claim by Trbuhović-Gjurić
fails, the second fails as an immediate consequence. So let us start by looking
at the second claim, for the moment "bracketing" the truth of the
first.
If the
second claim were correct, it is hard to see why Joffe
never mentioned this most interesting and unusual fact during the fifty‑five
years between 1905 and his death in 1960. Why did he not mention it in the 1955
article? And why not
in his autobiographical memoir,[122] which has a chapter on
Einstein? But he never claimed in print that he saw the original manuscript --
nor did anyone else until after Joffe's death. If
the memory stayed so vivid in his mind that he remembered the name
"Einstein-Marity" correctly fifty years
after having last seen it, why did he never mention the fact, even when he
published his two reminiscences of Einstein? The simplest explanation of why he
never claimed to have seen the manuscripts is that he never did.
Of course
the very possibility of the second claim depends entirely on the validity of
the first. If Röntgen had examined the three papers
in manuscript form, it is curious that he waited until September 1906 to write
to Einstein asking for reprints of his papers on electrodynamics to add to his
(Röntgen's) collection of papers on this topic. He
adds that he has been concerned with Brownian motion for some time and is thus
familiar with Einstein's work on this topic, and does not ask for a reprint of
this work. This contrast suggests that Röntgen was
not familiar with Einstein's work on electrodynamics in late 1906, casting doubt on the first part of Trbuhović‑Gjurićs
claim. And why should Paul Drude, the editor of the Annalen in 1905 and the author of two books and
numerous articles on electromagnetic theory and optics, have needed to call
upon Röntgen, an experimentalist in
Drude's advisor on theoretical physics papers for the Annalen was Max Planck, whom Einstein's
sister credits with sending Einstein the first written reaction from a
physicist to his 1905 relativity
paper.[123] Here is what the foremost account of
the development of theoretical physics in Germany has to say about the
editorial practices of the Annalen der Physik during the years
around 1905:
At the same time [1894] he [Planck]
acquired an official responsibility for theoretical physics for all of
As the advisor on theoretical physics
for the Annalen der Physik, in 1905 Planck was already familiar with
Einstein's work. For five years, Einstein had regularly submitted papers to
this journal, the most important of which treated thermodynamics and
statistical physics, subjects of particular interest to Planck at the time.
Einstein extended these studies to a related interest of Planck's, black body
radiation, in 1905.
Einstein's relativity theory of the
same year set Planck to work; it was the subject, Max Born observed, that
"caught Planck's imagination more than anything else."[124]
When
confronted with these circumstances, defenders of the claims put forward by Trbuhović-Gjurić
usually counter with the question: How else could Joffe
have known that "Marity" was the form of
her name that Marić
sometimes used? For example, Evan Walker Harris (one of those interviewed on
the PBS program) states that "Joffe would only
have known had he seen the original signed by her, since this usage of 'Mariti' apparently is not to be found in any of the
Einstein biographies.[125] This last statement is incorrect. The second edition
of Carl Seelig's well‑known biography of
Einstein, published the year before Joffe's article,
gives her name as "Mileva Maric
[sic] oder Marity".[126]
But whether
or not "this usage" of Marity is to be found
in any other of the Einstein biographies, there could well be other published
sources, in which Joffe could have found this fact.
"Marity" is, after all, the form in which
her name appears on their marriage certificate, and this fact might have been
picked up by some other writer about Einstein. A careful search would have to
be conducted of the literature about Einstein in several languages, including
Russian, before a valid judgment could be passed on the question of where Joffe could have found the information. I myself would
hazard the guess that Joffe saw this form of her name
in some document published right after Einstein's death. If he had only seen it
some fifty years earlier, it is hard to explain how he was able to reproduce
the exact form of the name in 1955.
But even
aside from a source in print, there is always the possibility that he heard it
from someone. One intriguing possible explanation of how Joffe
might have heard it is from Mrs. Einstein herself! In Joffe's
book of reminiscences,[127] there is a chapter on
Einstein. It does not include the story about having seen "Einstein-Marity" on the 1905 papers; but it does include an account of a meeting
with Einstein's wife in 1905.
I wanted very much to talk to Einstein
about all these questions and, together with my friend Wagner, visited him in
This is a
curious story in many ways: when he worked at the Patent Office, Einstein and Marić were in
Perhaps even
more likely is the possibility that Joffe learned
about the name Marity from Paul Ehrenflest.
He was friendly with Ehrenfest for decades, and the
published correspondence between them covers the years from 1907 until the
latter's untimely death.[129] Ehrenfest had been well
acquainted with both Einstein and Marić
since about 1911 or 1912, and could
easily have been the source of some information about Marić's
name that Joffe remembered years later in garbled
form.
But let us
suppose – contrary to all these arguments – that Trbuhović‑Gjurić's
two claims were valid. How
do we pass from these claims – that the papers had one signature (Einstein-Marity) – to the claim that this one signature represents two authors?
The three papers in question contain many authorial comments in the first
person singular. One example from each paper follows (italics added):
In this paper I wish to present the train of thought and cite the facts that led me onto this path ... (this volume, p.
178).
It is possible that the motions to be
discussed here are identical with so-called Brownian molecular motion; however,
the data available to me on the
latter are so imprecise that I could
not form a judgment on the question (this volume, p. 85).
In conclusion, let me note that my friend and colleague M. Besso
steadfastly stood by me in my work on
the problem discussed here, and that I
am indebted to him for several valuable suggestions (this volume, p. 159).
Of course,
this does not settle the question of who did the work. But it does show that
the articles were written with one authorial voice, and so does seem to settle
the question of whether the work was submitted with two named authors -- unless
we are to believe that the editors of the Annalen not only removed one of the
named authors, but carefully changed all uses of the first person plural to
first person singular!
We have seen that, in order to give
credence to Trbuhović-Gjurić's claims, we are forced to
pile one improbability upon another: the improbability of Röntgen
having had the manuscript, the improbability that Joffe
saw it, the improbability that his assertion that the papers were written by
one person should be interpreted as meaning they were written by two people.
The simplest and most natural course is to reject all of these implausible
claims.
EDITORIAL
NOTES
116. http://www.pbs.org/opb/einsteinswife/science/mquest.htm. Unless otherwise noted, the source
for all the following citations is the PBS Web site
http://www.pbs.org/opb/einsteinswife.
117. A. E. Joffe,
"Pamyati Alberta Eynshtyna,"
Uspekhi fizicheskikh nauk 57 (1955). I cite this article from the reprint in
Eynshtyn i sovremnwnaya fizika. Sbornik parnyati Eynshtyna (Moscow: GTTI, 1956), pp. 20-26; the
reference to "Eynshtyn-Mariti" is on p. 21.
1 thank Dr. Gennady Gorelik
for his help in finding this reference.
118.Albert Einstein: The Incorrigible Plagiarist (Downers Grove, Ill.:
XTX Inc., 2002), p. 197.
119. In an article entitled "Weil
nicht sein kann, was nicht sein darf… 'DIE ELTERN ODER 'DER
VATER' DER RELATIVITATSTHEORIE," which originally appeared in Birgit Kanngiesser et al., eds., Dokumentation des 18. Bundesweiten Kongresses
von Frauen in Naturwissenschaft und Technik vom 28-31. Mai 1992 in
http://www.rli.at/Seiten/kooperat/maric1.htm
for the first part (to access the second
and third parts, and the bibliography, substitute the numbers 2, 3, and 4,
respectively, for the number 1 in the Web address). This is the version that I
am citing.
120.Bjerknes,
Albert Einstein: The Incorrigible
Plagiarist, p. 197. The German text from which this was translated appears
on p. 198 and is taken from Desanka Trbuhović-Gjurić, Im Schatten Albert Einsteins/Das
tragische Leben der Mileva Einstein-Marić (Bern: Paul Haupt,
1983), which is a German translation of the Serbian original.
121. Ibid.
122. Vstrechi s fizikami,
nwi vosporninaniia o zarubezhnykh fizikah [Meetings with Physicists, My
Reminiscences of Physics Abroad] (Moscow: Gusudarstvennoye
Izdatelstvo Fiziko-Maternatitsheskoi
Literatury, 1962).
123. See Collected Papers, vol. 2, p. xxx.
124. Christa Jungnickel
and Russell McCormmach, Intellectual Mastery of Nature, vol. 2, The Now Mighty Theoretical Physics, 1870‑1925 (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 254-255, 309, and 248.
125. "Mileva
Marićs Relativistic Role," letter in Physics Today (February 199l): 122.
126. Seelig,
Albert Einstein/Eine
dokumentarische Biographie,
p. 29. The English edition, with the corresponding passage, did not appear
until 1956; see Seelig, Albert Einstein/A Documentary Biography,
p. 24.
127. See note 122. I have consulted
the German edition, Begegnungen mit Physikern (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner,
1967).
128. Ibid., pp. 88-89.
129. See Ehrenfest-Ioffe Nauchnaya perepiska, 1907-1933 (Leningrad: Nauka,
1973). Dr. Gennady Gorelik kindly informed me that
there is no mention of Mileva Marić in
this correspondence.