Einstein's son-in-law said of him: "Like coins struck off for some special occasions, faces like his arrive out of the centuries. Minds, too, for that matter".
As for hearts and bones and all of that, Dennis Overbye admits that he'd never been much interested in Einstein the man. "Like everyone else, I grew up with the image of the cosmic saint, whose only peer was God." But while attending a conference in 1990, Overbye (deputy science editor at the New York Times) heard "a small clique of revisionist historians" debating the possibility that Einstein had cheated his first wife, Mileva, out of her share of the credit for the theory of relativity. He doubted it was true but was amazed by what he heard and so set out to explore "both the sacred and the profane" aspects of Einstein's life.
What has emerged from his seven-year immersion in the vast collection of published and unpublished letters is indeed something of a bi-polar account of the "cosmic saint" who, like most of us, upon closer inspection proves a little less than saintly. However, Overbye's book is by no means an exercise in prurience or in icon-bashing. (Nor is it a work of feminist revisionism; Mileva was a promising physicist but, according to Overbye, no Madame Curie.) He doesn't shrink from documenting Einstein's cruelty to Mileva. But neither does he shirk - for the purpose of luring readers who find physics less than sexy - the duty of explicating Einstein's more intimidating theoretical excursions.
It's hard to say whether the subtitle of the book, A Scientific Romance, refers to Einstein's love of science, or to his relationship with Mileva. His halcyon days with the (increasingly) "gloomy Serb" were, after all, relatively short-lived. They met at Zurich's Polytechnical School while both physics students. Mileva had come from Hungary, where she had repeatedly topped her class. By the time she finished at Zurich, she had dropped to last and failed her graduation exams twice (the second time while pregnant with their first, and illegitimate, child). After much heady excitement imagining what they could together accomplish ("I'll be so happy," Albert wrote her, "when we . . . can bring our work on relative motion to a successful conclusion"), Mileva's days as a scientist came to an abrupt halt. Thereafter, she would sit, mostly in silence, on the periphery of her husband's heated scientific debates and increasingly heated private life.
AS AN OLD MAN, Einstein would say that he married her out of duty. It took him much less time to begin claiming that Mileva was "an unfriendly humorless creature who . . . smothers the joy in life of others through her mere presence . . . " This, to his extramarital lover (and cousin) Elsa, who was to become his second wife.
It's true that Mileva was prone to depression and ill health, and at one time was thought schizophrenic, though judging by this book, that would seem a gross exaggeration of her woes. But it's hard to see which came first in this chicken-and-egg scenario: Albert's neglect and disinterest, or Mileva's despondency and isolation.
Einstein is quoted as having said that "marriage is the unsuccessful attempt to make something lasting out of an accident". Overbye's diagnosis is slightly less cynical: gravity, he suggests, simply took its toll. Whatever the case, Mileva's star waned in inverse proportion to the waxing of her husband's.
"With the passage of time, Mileva was like a hiker who had . . . finally emerged into the clear to discover that the vista beneath her bore no resemblance to what she had so long anticipated . . ." The fog indeed had lifted, but only to reveal Albert "across the valley climbing another mountain altogether, by himself".
They divorced in 1919, after much rancour, financial squabbling, and battles over access to the children, though they corresponded to the end and apparently managed to achieve a post-marital peace. There seems a sad sense of inevitability to their demise, but this is probably just readerly hindsight. If we could exceed the speed of light, Einstein said, we could send telegrams to the past. And it's a testament to the kindness of Overbye's treatment of these two flawed, less-than-cosmic beings that we find ourselves wishing we could do just that, in order to spare a couple of people a lot of pain.
Other than the fact that this book is beautifully written and offers a lucid overview of the leaps made in physics during the first half of the 20th century (for the benefit of that poor overworked creature, "the general reader"), what's the value of the exercise? An examination of Einstein's love life, Overbye reasons, may not shed light on the origins of relativity or the quantum riddle, but it might help us to appreciate the intensity of his intellectual endeavours.
"The genius of abstraction who needs a woman to ground him in the world is a cliche. But in keeping with Niels Bohr's aphorism that a great truth is a statement whose opposite is also a great truth, so in Albert's case the cliche is turned inside out. It was with physics that he needed to ground himself in the surreal fog of desire . . . It was physics that offered a small, ordered closet in which to hide . . ."
Molly McCloskey is a writer and a critic