Albert Einstein, conceivably the last good man in this deconstructed century of failed gods and crumpled myths, is in woman trouble. A small band of scholars is claiming that much of the early work that made him famous, including, perhaps, the theory of relativity, should have been credited to his wife. The accusation would sound comical if it weren't tragic. This is Einstein, our most revered symbol of genius. We've all grown up with the vision of the humble patent examiner who overturned physics, with his corona of white hair and the sad deep eyes that have seen further than you can look. In our minds he floats like a sockless tumbleweed above the grit of mundane life. Behind the face we all recognize is a man we do not know.
Even physicists fall in love. If I were casting her in a movie, I would pick someone dark and sultry like Marlee Matlin, a little mysterious with an angry, damaged air. She has a slight limp -- do we know why? A childhood accident? Family tragedy? Does he find it sexy, affecting? Mileva Maric was a dark- haired Serbian woman who dreamed of being a physicist, a pre-feminist fighter, 21 when she entered the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. There she met Albert Einstein, a 17-year-old bohemian with thick curly hair and dark, warm eyes, bedroom eyes. They became lovers, sharing classes, textbooks and his father's disapproval. In 1902 they had an illegitimate daughter, who disappeared. Albert and Mileva married. Revolution was in the air, and they were the first modern couple. For pillow talk they had electrodynamics and atomic kinetics. In 1905 Einstein published a trio of brilliant papers in a single issue of the journal Annalen der Physik, among them the theory of relativity with its subversive notions of elastic space- time and interchangeable matter and energy. Another elucidated the quantum theory of light; still another a proof of the existence of atoms. You could say the 20th century was born in those pages.
His fame rocketed. She sank into his shadow, a housewife with two sons to raise, while he pursued general relativity -- the notion that gravity could be explained as "curved" space-time. They separated in 1914 and eventually divorced. As part of his alimony, he promised his future Nobel Prize money and delivered three years later. Einstein remarried and moved to America. Mileva and the kids were on their own. One son died in a mental institution, unvisited by his father; the other became an engineering professor. Mileva died in 1948, never having published a scientific paper under her own name.
The movie ends, a bitter drama. Einstein's biographers brushed her off as a gloomy Slav and a sloppy housekeeper, not quite bright enough to follow her husband into the new world of relativity, as if she deserved obscurity.
In 1987 his letters to her were published. Yes, love letters. But at least some of the language in those letters makes Albert and Mileva sound like research partners: "How happy and proud," he wrote in 1901, "I will be when the two of us together will have brought our work on the relative motion ((relativity)) to a victorious conclusion!" Our work?