Mrs. Einstein Revealed




I am guilty of being a male chauvinistic pig for harboring certain opinions about women in the past. But with experience, I have realised that there are many factors that aren't accounted for in calculations of intelligence... that any generalizations cannot accommodate the many variables that could catalyze / hamper genius. The vast majority of Nobel Prize Winners are men, but it could be that expectations and support for intelligent women in society are such that they don't allow women to have incredible careers. Maybe its a huge male conspiracy. I am rethinking some of those thoughts now with some revelations about the genius of our time, Albert Einstein.

In a program on PBS, historians talk about an investigation into the facts behind the annulus mirablis (miracle year 1905), in which Einstein published 5 papers, each revolutionizing physics. Photoelectric effect, Special Theory of Relativity and Brownian motion are the first to come to my mind. Historians find it hard to believe that someone who was working fulltime (6 days a week) at the Swiss Patent Office, could manage to publish such path-breaking papers. When one then considers the fact that Mileva Maric, Einstein's first wife was a Haus Frau with more time to devote to physics things start looking fishy. What arouses even more suspicion is the fact that an editor at Annalen Der Physik recalls seeing two names on the papers and not just Uncle Albert's.

Then there is the fact that Einstein secretly shares the prize money with Mileva Maric evenly many years after the discoveries. Mileva was also an academic star at ETH and in fact takes one attempt to enter ETH (as opposed to 2 attempts for Einstein), and does much better than Albert in college too.(Maybe I don't count that much because I didn't do too well in college either... just waiting for that miracle year too.;)) The historians also point to the fact that Albert Einstein never produced anything as incredible as his theories from 1905 after he divorces Mileva. They don't completely discredit Albert Einstein, but contend that Mileva might have been a contributor to some of the papers.

If you wanna read more about this I refer you to The PBS Website.

You can also read about another lady genius Sophie Germain here. She was an 18th century mathematician who studied Math disguised as a man and dreamt about proving Fermat's Last Theorem. That's located at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/proof/germain.html