A short compilation on the flip side of the life of a man of genius !!!
Einstein the man behind relativity (and much more) was also a very romantic guy..and that was not just till those early twenties but much beyond.
A little bit on his early days:
Einstein’s family made gadgets, they owned a power and lighting systems company and that was as good as being introduced to the computer industry in our times…lucky chap! But then later his family moved to Italy and he was left behind in Munich. He dropped out of school and then this guy tried to study engineering in Zurich. Geniuses also falter somewhere…our fundoo was poor at literature. So, Einstein was sent to a prep school for a season. And this is the place where he meets the “first” girl of his life (or may be that’s what I read up until now! ) That season he stays with the Wintelers family, a big, boisterous intellectual family. There he meets Marie, one of the Winteler daughters. Two girls from the family were married off to Einstein’s family and his parents liked Marie a lot! So, things were falling in place…but then how much did this “ramba” affect his academic life? At that age, 15, he had started thinking of light wave and ether, about the issues that relativity would eventually solve. He tried to imagine what would happen if he could travel along with the light ray. What would he see? But even if he were traveling with the light wave, the light wave would still look like it was zipping past him at the speed of light. This was a paradox that bothered him, a lot. Maxwell’s’ eqn says that light travels at a particular speed but they never says what speed you are traveling at!
So, how much did college life transform our scientist…? This class nerd..having the image of a guy immersed in his math book transformed into a very attractive guy , with a lot of charisma and personality. Coming back to his love life, Einstein never married Marie. There was this new girl , his classmate in college, Mileva who stole his heart. She was an intellectual force whom Einstein enjoyed to reckon with and it was he who fell for her. He chased her round in college for a year .She had done a lot of hardwork to get to college. It was really commendable for a girl to pursue a scientific career in those days and she was the only female in the all guys class. She was so much committed to her academic career that she dropped out of school for half a year to clear her mind and she decided that getting involved with Einstein was not the best thing for her career. But he won her over at the end. They spent a lot of time discussing the “out of curriculum” (so, may be she had a lot to contribute in the theory of relativity) stuff and that meant low grades. After graduation, without a job, they spent a lot of time together, they had a reunion and went on a trip across the alps. She got pregnant…uh oh..that meant a lot of trouble for his career. He got the famous patent office job in Bern and she went to Serbia to have the baby. We really don’t know what wonders that baby could have bestowed to the world!!! She went back to Bern without the baby! Living in the Swiss society with a Siberian girl friend , having an illegitimate kid was the last thing he could afford and she made the supreme sacrifice, giving away the child to preserve his career. Eventually they married and she ended up becoming a housewife waiting for his return everyday to discuss some physics. But all this while may be Einstein was not all that perturbed. That was the time when he published his paper on relativity and another very important paper on then the quantum theory of light. He became more and more famous and left his patent office job and got a university job and Mileva was with him through all these years and more. But he pretty much forced her out of the vital center of his life, that is, physics. Every one would agree when I say Mileva’s is indeed a very sad story. After all she never got a degree, never got to do any science, ended up doing a lot of housework and was forgotten by history.
Now the story takes a turn and enters our third heroine. Elsa, in 1912, Einstein went to Berlin and there he had a reunion with his cousin Elsa. Both of them had intense correspondence and then Mileva intercepted their correspondence.. shorltly after that Einstein was recruited by Max Plank. Germany was all set to invest a lot on Einstein’s Quantum theory and he was given an amazing offer to go to Berlin which he simply couldn’t refuse. After that, finally he had got a job with more money and no students. And Elsa was always there to help out with things on the German end. There he started working on his general theory of relativity. And that was all he did for the next couple of years. He lived aloof in an apartment with lot of paper strewn all around him. One of his friends described his working habits as follows: "he works until you drag him away, then you give him some food, he eats until it's gone, you put him in bed, he sleeps until you wake him up, and then it all starts all over again. He was completely obsessed." Hey that’s called grit and determination…getting inspired eh? :)
All this while he had a lot of trouble with Mileva and finally divorced her and married Elsa, in 1919 and their marriage carried on till 1936 when Elsa died. But during the 1920’ s Albert had lot of affairs in Berlin. May be he wasn’t really happy with a wife who didn’t know physics, unfortunately may be he didn’t recognize that this wasn’t the case with his first wife.
So, what would you conclude about the other side of this man of genius..?
May be he always lived a life of anticipation, ever yearning for the next thing, always envisioning a better life.
"Einstein always felt paradise was round the corner, but as soon as he got there, it stared looking shabby and something better appeared. "
