The claims about Mileva Marić’s alleged
contributions to Einstein’s early scientific achievements are devoid of
credible supporting evidence.
By Allen Esterson
Twenty-five years ago the name Mileva Marić,
Einstein’s first wife, was virtually unknown to the general public. In
the 1970s a project to publish The
Collected Papers of Albert Einstein was inaugurated, under the
initial editorship of John Stachel, Director, Center for Einstein Studies at
The
background
It is widely believed that Einstein was rather
backward as a child, and a mediocre school student. However, evidence about his
early achievements at school comes in a letter his mother Pauline Einstein
wrote to her sister Fanny in 1886, when Einstein was 7 years old, in which she
reported: “Yesterday Albert got his grades, once again he was ranked
first, he got a splendid report card...”[1]
During his years at his secondary school, the Luitpold Gymnasium that he
attended in Munich from the autumn of 1888, he performed well in science and
mathematics, and rather less well at subjects that held less interest for him.
A detailed account of his precocious accomplishments in mathematics and physics
comes from Max Talmey, a medical student who visited the Einsteins each week
during the years 1889 to early 1894. Although 11 years younger than Talmey,
Einstein’s “exceptional intelligence…enabled him to discuss
with a college graduate subjects far above the comprehension of children of his
age”. Responding to his interest in physics Talmey writes that he gave
him two popular books on physical science, and then, when he was 11, a
well-known text-book on Euclidean geometry which, with initial guidance,
Einstein worked through by himself. He then moved on to more advanced maths
books and Talmey reports that soon “the flight of his mathematical genius
was so high that I could no longer follow.”[2]
In 1894, when Einstein was 15, his father’s
electrical engineering business was failing financially, and his parents
emigrated to
This is the academic background to his commencing
studying for a teaching diploma in physics and mathematics in the autumn of
1896, at 17 still below the normal age of entrance to Zurich Polytechnic. And
it was here that he met Mileva Marić, who enrolled in the same course that
autumn. Marić’s school record, especially in physics and
mathematics, was excellent, but institutional obstacles to girls wishing to
study science in the Austro-Hungarian Empire meant she had had to leave her
Serbian homeland to eventually graduate from a Swiss girls’ high school
in 1895.[5] She
initially considered a medical career, entering the
Einstein and Marić were part of a small group
most of whom were specialising in mathematics. Marić spent the first
semester (winter) of her second year at the
From the correspondence between Einstein and
Marić while they were students it is apparent that a friendship started to
develop between them towards the end 1897 and by the end of 1899 this had
blossomed into a passionate love affair. Passages in Einstein’s letters
indicate that he believed he had found in Marić both someone to love and
someone who would be his colleague in the future scientific endeavours he
envisaged for himself.[11]
The
Einstein/Marić correspondence and related claims
We are now in a position to start considering the
contentions made about Marić’s supposed contributions to
Einstein’s celebrated 1905 papers which influenced the course of
twentieth century physics. These range from claims that that she assisted him
with these papers, that she helped with the mathematics, or even that she co-authored
them. The central contention is that the evidence for Marić’s
contribution can be found in the correspondence between her and Einstein in the
years 1897 through 1903. There are 11 surviving letters by Marić and 43 by
Einstein from this period. Many of the letters sent by Marić were lost.
(Einstein was not the kind of person who would have taken trouble to preserve
such letters at that time; in December 1901 he wrote to Marić: “You
know what a dreadful mess my worldly possessions are in.”)[12]
One of the proponents of the claims about
Marić’s supposed contributions to Einstein’s work, Evan Harris
Walker, writes: “I find statements in 13 of his 43 letters to her that
refer to her research or to an ongoing collaborative effort…”[13]
We may separate this contention into two parts. As examples of references to
Marić’s research
The references
In order to decide between the differing
interpretations of Einstein’s occasional inclusive language in regard to
Marić in these letters it is necessary to examine specific instances, and
also the broader picture. In a considerable proportion of Einstein’s
letters he reports with evident excitement on physics ideas he is working on.
Not one of Marić’s letters indicate anything remotely similar on her
part; they are almost entirely devoted to personal matters. In two instances
there are surviving letters from Marić responding to a letter from
Einstein in which he discusses physics ideas on which he is working in some
detail. In neither of her replies does she even allude to these ideas.[16]
As Stachel observes in regard to one of these instances, Marić’s
reply contains several comments on personal matters, but there is “not a
word about any scientific
topic in her letter, let alone a response to Einstein’s lengthy
discussion of his ideas about the electrodynamics of moving bodies.”[17]
The fact that in Einstein’s letters he frequently refers to
extra-curricular physics topics on which he is working, occasionally going into
details about his ideas and the authors he has been reading, has been taken as
evidence that they worked together on these subjects beyond some joint reading
of books. However, given the dearth of indications from Marić herself that
she played a role in his investigations, it is clear that Einstein’s
evident overflowing excitement about his ideas on a range of topics was such
that he felt impelled to write about them to Marić, whom he fondly hoped
would prove a scientific partner in his future endeavours. This excitement shines
out in a letter written in May 1901: “I just read a wonderful paper by
Lenard on the generation of cathode rays by ultraviolet light. Under the
influence of this beautiful piece I am filled with such happiness and joy that
I absolutely must share some of it with you.”[18]
Stachel has demonstrated in considerable detail that
“the places in his letters to Marić where Einstein refers to
‘our work’ are quite general statements; when it comes to specific
assertions about the work he invariably uses the first person singular
(‘I’, ‘my’) in describing it.”[19]
In three of the instances where inclusive language is used by Einstein he is
alluding to his paper on capillarity, submitted to the journal Annalen der Physik in December 1900,
and published on 1 March 1901.[20]
But only results he himself has obtained are mentioned in relation to this
paper. Moreover, in a letter to her
friend Helene Kaufler, Marić writes as follows with respect to the same
paper: “Albert wrote a paper in physics that will probably soon be published
in the Annalen der Physik.”[21]
So she states explicitly that it was Einstein who wrote the capillarity paper,
and gives not the slightest suggestion to her friend that she made any
contribution. She adds: “You can imagine how proud I am of my
darling.” Again, these are not the words of someone who had made a
substantive contribution to the paper.
Evidently Einstein’s use of inclusive language in relation to his
1901 paper on capillarity was not an indication of joint collaboration.
The above information indicates that Einstein’s
use of inclusive language about ideas he is working on does not by any means
show that Marić collaborated with him on these topics.
Apart from the letter to Helene Kaufler concerning
Einstein’s first published paper (1901), there are other indications in
her own words that Marić did not contribute to Einstein’s
publications. To Helene in 1906 she wrote “the papers he has written are
already mounting quite high”.[29]
These words to her friend contain not the least suggestion that she might have
contributed in any way to the papers, which, of course, include those of 1905.
Even more telling are the words she wrote in December 1901 in a letter to
Helene regarding Einstein’s first attempt to obtain a Ph.D.:
“Albert has written a magnificent study, which he has submitted as his
dissertation…I have read this work with great joy and real admiration for
my little darling, who has such a clever head.”[30]
These latter words are hardly those of someone who collaborated with Einstein
on groundbreaking ideas. They are more in line with Einstein’s writing to
Marić in December 1901 anticipating that “soon you’ll be my
‘student’ again, like in
The plain fact is that there is not a single citable
document written by Marić that contains any account of her ideas on the
physics topics that constituted Einstein’s published papers in the early
years of the twentieth century. There are, in letters to Einstein, a few
references to the subject matter of her dissertations. There is also one letter
in which, after mentioning having read two non-physics books sent to her by
Einstein, she asks him: “Have you read the Planck [paper] yet?”[33]
Her next sentence is revealing: “It looks interesting.” It is
inconceivable that had Einstein just referred to a paper by Planck he would not
have discussed its contents and expressed his opinion about it, whereas
Marić’s comment is so vague that it is not even evident that she had
read it thoroughly. She is, however, less reticent about discussing hypnotism,
the subject of one of the books sent by Einstein; in her next letter she writes
several sentences about it.[34]
As Stachel observes, while Einstein’s letters “convey the
distinctive impression of an original and imaginative mind at work,”
Marić’s limited comments relating to physics “depict an eager,
hardworking student, but without a spark of originality, or more precisely, of
scientific originality…”[35]
Aside from his published papers, Einstein’s Collected Papers contain an
impressively large mass of letters to friends and to eminent physicists
containing discussions of current physics ideas in the years from his student
days to the time he and Marić separated and beyond. (Among the top rank
physicists of his day with whom he corresponded on his ideas in just the period
from 1905 to 1908 were Lenard, von Laue, Röntgen, Stark, Planck, Wien, Lorentz,
and Sommerfeld.) Against this there is not a single letter by Marić in
which she suggests any collaboration with Einstein on work relating to his
published papers, and only one relevant document in Marić’s hand.
This is an undated short “Response to Plank’s [sic] Manuscript” in which reference to Einstein’s work
is in the first person, included with a letter from Einstein to Planck relating
to a paper the latter was to publish early in 1910.[36]
Given the absence of any similar document by Marić it would appear that
she acted as Einstein’s amanuensis on this occasion.* In addition,
Stachel has noted that Einstein’s second notebook for his lecture courses
on mechanics at the University of Zurich for the winter semester 1909-1910
includes seven pages of notes in Marić’s handwriting very closely
corresponding to the introductory sections of the first notebook.[37]
An examination of the pages in question reveals they cover elementary
introductory material in mechanics, a level of knowledge she would have
acquired early in her Polytechnic diploma course.[38]
The notebooks were written after Einstein was appointed to a professorship at
Einstein’s friend and colleague Philipp Frank
wrote of the period after the Einsteins were married that “When he wanted
to discuss his ideas, which came to him in great abundance,
[Marić’s] response was so slight that he was often unable to decide
whether or not she was interested.”[40]
Maurice Solovine, a friend of Einstein’s from his first days in
In contrast to the claims made about
Marić’s alleged ongoing work in physics, there is evidence that
suggests that even before her first diploma exam failure she may have been uncertain
about her ambitions in that direction. According to a letter written by Helene
Kaufler to her [Helene’s] mother in July 1900, Marić was
“offered an assistantship at the Polytechnic but did not wish to accept
it”; instead “she would rather apply for an open position as
librarian at the Polytechnic”.[42]
The few letters to Helene Kaufler in the period immediately following her
marriage to Einstein in January 1903 make no mention of physics, except in
relation to her husband’s activities. Typical is her letter written in
March 1903 in which she wrote about their “nice little household, which I
am taking care of quite alone”. Of Einstein she wrote: “I am even
closer to my sweetheart, if that is at all possible, than I was in our Zurich
days; he is my only company, and I am happiest when he is next to me, and I am
often angry at the boring office that take so much of his time...He is employed
in the local Patent Office as an expert, and for eight hours every day he does
this very boring work.”[43]
We know, incidentally, that Einstein did not find his work at the patent office
boring, or without value.
The tendentiousness of
Addendum to the above discussion of the
Einstein/Marić correspondence:
Senta Troemel-Ploetz (1991, p. 425, see below) provides some quotations that
purportedly show that Marić collaborated with Einstein on his advanced
work on physics. The first is from Marić to Helene Savić as follows:
“Wir leben und arbeiten immer noch wie früher (we are living and working
the way we did earlier, meaning: as students).” What Troemel-Ploetz fails
to record is that at the time of writing of the letter (early in 1901)
Marić was still a student
(writing a dissertation and preparing for retaking her diploma examination in
July 1901), and Einstein was working on his first attempt at a Ph.D. thesis, at
that time under the supervision of Zurich Polytechnic professor of physics
Friedrich Weber. Marić was merely reporting that, as before, she and
Einstein enjoyed studying in each other’s company. There is nothing to
suggest that she was collaborating on extra-curricular physics, and in any
case, she had her hands full with her own work for the July diploma exam.
The second quotation provided by Troemel-Ploetz is
this from Einstein to Marić in September 1900: “I am also looking
forward very much to our new papers.” However, this is immediately
followed by his writing: “You must continue with your investigations
– how proud I will be to have a little Ph.D. for a
sweetheart…” So the new paper in Marić’s case, as
indicated by Einstein, is the dissertation she was working on which she hoped
to develop into a Ph.D. thesis. Einstein, for his part, was planning to
undertake the writing of his own Ph.D. thesis. In other words, the reference in
the letter to “our papers” is to the respective (different) papers
each was in the process of undertaking, and does not indicate any collaboration
on the extra-curricular physics that Einstein was interested in researching.
These instances again exemplify that the proponents of
the “collaboration” thesis frequently cite evidence that apparently
supports their contentions, but which, on closer examination, does not do so.
(Other examples that Troemel-Ploetz goes on to quote have been covered by my
discussion of this issue above.)
Further
contentions
One strand of evidence presented by proponents of the
collaboration thesis was first published by Marić’s biographer
Desanka Trbuhović-Gjurić,[47]
and has been reproduced by Senta Troemel-Ploetz, who writes in relation to the
three most famous 1905 papers: “Abram F. Joffe, the famous Russian
physicist who was then an assistant to Röntgen (a member of the editorial team
that examined the articles sent to Annalen
der Physik for publication) wrote in his Errinerungen an Albert Einstein (Joffe
1960) that the original manuscripts were signed Einstein-Marić.”[48]
This claim has been fully investigated and comprehensively refuted by two
Einstein scholars, Alberto A. Martínez and, in painstaking detail, John
Stachel.[49]
The relevant passage by Joffe, from a 1955 obituary of Einstein, is the
following (literally translated by Martínez):
“In the year 1905, in Annals of Physics, there appeared three
articles, thereupon beginning three most important, relevant directions in the
physics of the 20th century. Those were: the theory of Brownian Motion, the
photon theory of light and the theory of relativity. Their author –
unknown until that time, a bureaucrat at the Patent Office in
It is evident that Joffe did not claim that he had
seen the original manuscripts, nor that Marić was a co-author of these 1905
papers; on the contrary, he writes that the author was “a bureaucrat at
the Patent Office in Bern”, in other words, Albert Einstein. As Stachel
points out, each of the papers contain authorial comments in the first person
singular.[51]
Stachel also notes that these claims about co-authorship necessitate that
eminent members of the editorial board of Annalen
der Physik, Paul Drude and Max Planck, were complicit in the
removal of Marić’s name on the published papers. And is it really
conceivable that, had Joffe reported that Einstein’s three most
celebrated 1905 papers were originally “signed” by Einstein and
Marić as co-authors, as Trbuhović-Gjurić
claims, such an astonishing revelation would have not been given wide publicity
at the time? Trbuhović-Gjurić
goes on to embellish her misleading report with evidence-free conjectures
(presented as statements of fact) that are given a detailed rebuttal by
Stachel.[52]
Undeterred by the clear evidence of Joffe’s actual words,
Note: In
his book “Meetings with Scientists” Joffe writes that when he was
assistant to Röntgen the latter advised him, in preparation for defending his
Ph.D. thesis in 1905 (prior to the publication of Einstein’s relativity
paper), to study what we would now call the prehistory of Special Relativity
theory. Had Röntgen refereed Einstein’s original manuscript a short time
later, as Trbuhović-Gjurić asserts, Joffe could hardly have failed to
have stated so. But he makes no mention of any such occurrence, and we may
conclude that the whole basis of Trbuhović-Gjurić’s
claims about Joffe is without foundation. (A. F. Joffe, Begegnungen Mit Physikern, 1967, pp.
23-24) (For a fuller discussion of this issue, see my Critique of Bjerknes.)
(Robert Schulmann
reports that when he interviewed Trbuhović-Gjurić
in 1983 about her claims about the original manuscript for which she referenced
Joffe (1960), “she said that the proof of the statement was contained in
a microfilm which she had had to return to the Soviet Union a few weeks
before” (A. Pais, 1994, p.
15). However, it seems that
Trbuhović-Gjurić may have
actually been referring to a passage in a book published in 1962 by a Soviet
science writer, Daniil Semenovich Danin, which contains a paragraph, evidently
deriving from Joffe, in which Danin writes that the three relevant 1905 papers
were “signed” Einstein-Marity: see J. Stachel (2005), pp. liv-lvii;
Martínez
(2005). In the passage in question Danin clearly refers to the 1905 papers
as having a single author, who was at that time “a third class
engineering expert in the Swiss Patent Office”. So either (a) Trbuhović-Gjurić
is alluding to the paragraph written by Joffe in the book she cites, but does
not quote Joffe’s actual words,
choosing instead to paraphrase them (incorrectly), or (b) she has paraphrased
the paragraph from Danin (deriving from Joffe but misleadingly using the word
“signed” not present in Joffe’s paragraph) and omitted the
critical fact that Danin indicated that the papers had a single author, while
misleadingly citing Joffe’s book for the source. Whichever of these is
the case, the failure to quote the actual cited passage on such an important
issue is an indication of the unscholarly (and unreliable) nature of her book,
as is further illustrated below. )
Turning now to the contents of Trbuhović-Gjurić’s
biography of Marić, in the Introduction (dated 1982) to the first German
edition the author writes that her book reports her researches (undertaken
after her retirement, presumably in the 1960s, the decade at the end of which
the book was first published) among surviving relatives and friends of the
Marić family, and includes oral communications, letters and notes.[54]
It provides valuable factual information about Marić’s early life
and her considerable academic accomplishments prior to becoming a student at
Zurich Polytechnic, but its reliance on unverifiable, third-hand (at best)
hearsay stories from interested parties renders it valueless as a source of
reliable evidence concerning the issue in question. Apart from the numerous
quotations from the Marićs’ family friends and acquaintances,
recorded some sixty years after the events in question, Trbuhović-Gjurić
even provides dialogue between Einstein and Marić when no one else was
present.[55]
(Four of these unreferenced scenarios, reproduced verbatim, can be traced to
the children’s book Albert Einstein
(1963) by Aylesa Forsee (pp. 11-12), and are manifestly imaginative inventions
by Forsee!)
It is unsurprising that the Einstein biographer
Albrecht Fölsing describes Trbuhović-Gjurić’s
book as a combination of fictional invention and pseudo-documentation
(“belletristischer Erfindung und Pseudodokumentation”) .[56]
Similarly, Schulmann and Holton describe the book as “a nationalist
puffery of a biography of Mileva Marić”,[57]
and Pais writes in relation to Trbuhović-Gjurić’s
contentions about the role of Marić in Einstein’s scientific output
that he has “not found a single reason for believing that in this respect
the author’s allegations are founded on fact”.[58]
(The book’s unscholarly nature is shown by the fact that its material is
almost entirely unreferenced, and by its lack of both index and bibliography.)
It will only be possible here to give a few examples
to illustrate the unreliability of the contentions to be found in
Trbuhović-Gjurić’s
book. She quotes a statement Einstein supposedly made to Marić’s
brother Miloš in which he is alleged to have said that Marić
“was the first to draw my attention to the significance of the ether in
the universe”.[59]
But, as already noted, as early as 1895 when he was only sixteen Einstein was
sufficiently knowledgeable about the notion of the ether to write a short essay
on the subject. (Trbuhović-Gjurić
provides no reference for the quotation, and as Miloš was taken prisoner
in WW1 by the Russians in 1917 and never returned home,[60]
this could only have been a third-hand hearsay report.) She also writes of a
reunion of young intellectual friends of Miloš at which Einstein was
supposedly present. Recalling this occasion a Dr Ljubomir-Bata Dumić is quoted as saying: “We knew what she
had done [for Albert], that she was the author of his glory. She solved for him
all the mathematical problems, above all those concerning the theory of
relativity…”[61]
Evidently Dr Dumić (if we are to give any credence to this scenario) was
unaware that Einstein’s 1905 special relativity paper requires only an
elementary knowledge of algebra and calculus that Einstein had probably
acquired even before he began the diploma course at Zurich Polytechnic. (As
Jürgen Renn, an editor of the Einstein Collected
Papers, has observed, “If he had needed help with that kind of
mathematics, he would have ended there.”) Einstein is quoted as having
said at the gathering: “I need my wife. She solves all the mathematical
problems for me.”[62]
This can hardly be taken seriously. As we have seen, Einstein was precociously
talented at mathematics, even if he later neglected more advanced maths until
he needed it. On the other hand, although she obtained excellent grades in high
school, Marić’s average grade in the mathematics entrance
examination for Zurich Polytechnic was a mediocre 4.25 (on a scale 1-6), and in
the final diploma examination in 1900 her grade in the mathematics component
(theory of functions) was only 5 compared to Einstein's 11 (on a scale 1-12).[63]
(None of the other three candidates achieved less than grade 11.) And when she
retook the exam in 1901 her mathematics grade only improved to 7 (scale 1-12).[64]
At one point Trbuhović-Gjurić
quotes Peter Michelmore’s remarking that Marić helped Einstein solve
certain mathematical problems.[65]
The relevant section of Michelmore’s biography of Einstein contains
numerous assertions that are anecdotal, including invented dialogue, and some
factual errors. For instance, he asserts that Marić “was as good at
mathematics as Marcel [Grossman]”,[66]
which is absurd, given her failure to achieve even half the grade of the
candidates immediately above her in the mathematics component of the 1900
diploma exam and Grossman’s later achievements as a pure mathematician.
Equally absurd is the implication of Trbuhović-Gjurić’s
writing in the context of Einstein’s turning to Grossman for help in 1912
that he had never needed such outside assistance with mathematical difficulties
when he (supposedly) had worked with Marić.[67]
(At that time Einstein required knowledge of Riemann’s non-Euclidean
four-dimensional geometry and of tensor calculus to maintain progress towards
his general theory of relativity arrived at in 1915.)
In the light of suggestions that Einstein was a
mediocre mathematician it is worth noting the following in relation to
Einstein’s Ph.D. thesis submitted to
Trbuhović-Gjurić’s
portrayal of Marić’s role is governed by her evident determination
to present her as having collaborated in all Einstein’s work right up to
the time they arrived in
Elsewhere Trbuhović-Gjurić
writes that “from the start of Einstein’s studies right up to the
time he moved to
Senta
Troemel-Ploetz’s claims
Another frequently cited proponent of the
collaboration thesis is the Swiss linguist Senta Troemel-Ploetz, whose
contentions in her aforementioned 1990 article are almost entirely dependent on
a completely uncritical recycling of material in Trbuhović-Gjurić’s
book as if the latter were a work of scholarship. Never once does she question
the reliability of this material. It would take a lengthy article to
demonstrate the numerous fallacious contentions to be found in the article, and
a few representative examples must suffice here.
Troemel-Ploetz begins her exposition of the case that
Marić collaborated with Einstein on his major work by reporting the
apocryphal story (his “admission”, as Troemel-Ploetz puts it) that
Einstein said “My wife does my mathematics”, which, she claims,
“is general knowledge at the ETH [originally Polytechnic] in
Examples of Troemel-Ploetz’s unquestioning
acceptance of anything claimed by Trbuhović-Gjurić
abound. For instance, in another passage in which she describes Marić as a
mathematician she writes that “without the fundamental contribution of
Mileva Einstein-Marić, the theory of relativity would not exist.”,[76]
a contention with no evidential basis. In the same section she cites
Trbuhović-Gjurić quoting a reported comment supposedly made by
Marić’s father, Miloš, to his son and
friends in relation to a visit he made to the Einsteins in
Elsewhere she makes a serious blunder when, on quoting
a statement by Peter Michelmore cited by Trbuhović-Gjurić,
she writes that Michelmore “had much information from Albert
Einstein”.[77]
In fact in his “Author’s Note” to his book (published seven
years after Einstein’s death) Michelmore writes that he spent two days
with Einstein’s son, Hans Albert, from whom he obtained information about
Einstein (who is not mentioned among his sources).[78]
A story of Trbuhović-Gjurić’s
is recycled by Troemel-Ploetz as follows: “A mathematician of the
University of Zagreb recalled that Albert Einstein every now and then helped
his wife doing the housework because he felt sorry that after her housework was
done, she had to do his mathematical problems till way past midnight (Trbuhović-Gjurić,
1983, p. 87).”[79]
What Trbuhović-Gjurić actually
writes is that the story came from the daughter of Svetozar Varičak,
son of Vladimir Varičak,
a professor of mathematics at the
Another story of Trbuhović-Gjurić’s
uncritically recycled by Troemel-Ploetz is the following: “Together with
Paul Habicht she [Marić ] worked at the construction of a machine for
measuring very small currents by way of multiplication…When both she and
Habicht were satisfied with the results, they left it to Albert Einstein, as
patent expert, to describe the apparatus.”[81]
Troemel-Ploetz goes on to report that an article about this was published by
Einstein under his own name, and the apparatus was patented under the joint
names of the Habicht brothers and Einstein. However, Trbuhović-Gjurić
gives no source for her account, though she provides an anecdotal story in
which “one of the Habicht brothers” supposedly asked Marić why
she had not given her own name in the application for the patent, to which she
is said to have replied “What for, we are both only one stone” [a
play on the name Einstein – Stein means “stone”]. That
Trbuhović-Gjurić is unable
to attribute this report specifically to one or other of the Habicht brothers
is a measure of its unreliability. In fact the development of the little
“machine” is well documented from the time Einstein announced his
discovery of a new method of measuring very small quantities of [electrical]
energy (in a letter to Conrad and Paul Habicht dated 15 July 1907) to the
manufacturing of the device.[82]
Conrad Habicht was a member of the “
Troemel-Ploetz’s ignorance of the subject matter
around which the contentions at issue revolve is revealed by her writing that
Einstein “did not achieve anything comparable after what is defined as
his ‘creative outburst of 1905’. Again and again people remarked
that none of his later work, after the age of 26, surpassed or even reached the
same level of his earlier research.”[85]
She is evidently unaware that, in addition to other fundamental research, over
the next decade Einstein worked on ideas that culminated in what is perhaps his
greatest achievement, the general theory of relativity that transformed the
modern view of the concept of gravity. One wonders who these
“people” are whose opinion she supposedly reports.
One other section in Troemel-Ploetz’s article is
worth examining. After a passage in which she suggests that the editors of the
first volume of Einstein’s Collected
Papers suppressed evidence that would show that Marić’s
role was more than “a sounding board for Einstein’s ideas”,
she complains that all seven letters of Marić’s to her friend Helene
Kaufler which have relevant passages quoted in that volume “have parts
deleted”. She then proceeds to build a conspiracy theory around the fact
that in one letter, written by Marić to Kaufler in the summer of 1900
(Document 64), there are three “deletions”, and that an editorial
footnote indicates that one of these concerns Marić’s completed
diploma dissertation. She notes that in a footnote to a letter of
Einstein’s there is a reference to an omitted portion of Document 64,
this time providing an incomplete sentence from it, and that this same footnote
“is referred to again and again in further editorial footnotes”.
She now insinuates that the editors have deliberately withheld information so
that “we cannot deduce what [Marić] is saying about the topic she
has chosen” for her dissertations.[86]
However, the publication of Marić’s letters to Kaufler has shown
that there is nothing of any great significance in the omitted paragraph in
question, the essential points of which were included in the incomplete
sentence quoted by Troemel-Ploetz. Marić simply reports to her friend:
“I had to put down on paper the major topic that I have selected for my
diploma, and possibly also for my doctoral dissertation, so that Professor
Weber might give it a little bit of criticism.”[87]
The reason this is cited in some later footnotes to letters is simply to
clarify the referenced items by indicating that they relate to her ambition of
achieving a doctorate or to her working on her diploma dissertation for the
1901 exam. Troemel-Ploetz follows this up by asserting that “we have to
take the editor’s word” in a footnote for the fact that Marić
failed her diploma exam a second time, so “we do not know whether she
failed by default, that is by withdrawing her Diplomarbeit [diploma
dissertation], as Trbuhović-Gjurić suggests.”[88] But,
contrary to what Troemel-Ploetz writes, the footnote in question (Collected Papers Vol. 1, document 121,
n. 1), provides the reference for the official notification that Marić
failed the 1901 diploma exam. (The editor of Volume 1 of the Collected Papers, John Stachel, gives
information about her grade in her second diploma exam elsewhere.)[89]