Features
The Dark Side of Albert: Einstein and Mileva Marić, his First Wife
By DAVID TOPPER Albert Einstein was the most photographed scientist of the 20th century. The scope of emotions depicted range from the serious to the silly: from looking like a secular saint with hands folded and deep in contemplation of supposedly solemn thoughts, to the image hanging in front of me on the bulletin board over my computer table, showing him sticking out his tongue at the cameraman. Living during the heyday of the development of the film camera, he and the press surely took advantage of it. The positive persona of the genius was formed out of these visual images. This visual disposition was supplemented with endless quotations on not only science and the universe, but also with homilies on life and how to live it, with much of that which you will find quoted, being things he never said. Overall, the general image of him and his personality has him coming out seemingly squeaky-clean.
Nonetheless, those of us who have looked into the man in more detail are aware of episodes of less than saintly behavior by Albert – the famous scientific idol. If, for example, you read any of the half-dozen or so lengthy biographies about him, you will find scattered therein stories of him speaking inappropriately or behaving, one might say, as a jerk. Having read all those books, and others – and even written three books on him myself – I knew this. So when I started reading a recent long biography of his first wife, Mileva Marić, I had no reason to think I’d be shocked, since I had already read a lot about her, including a book of letters to and from her best friend, which also contained a brief biography. But to my surprise, I was staggered in reading over 400 pages of his nasty behavior concentrated around this one woman – a woman whom he fell in love with as a university student, and who was the only mother of his children.
Here is the sad – and probably surprising to most readers – story of Mileva and Albert.
Mileva Marić was born on December 19, 1875, into a Christian Orthodox Serbian family. With a dislocated left hip, she walked with a limp throughout her life. (Her sister, Zorka, had the same congenital condition.) Forced to wear an orthopedic shoe, she was teased and mocked in school. Nonetheless, this very bright girl filled her lonely childhood with her studies (she was especially good at math) and piano lessons. Encouraged by a very loving father, she excelled in school, and was the first girl to attend high school physics courses in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After graduating in 1896, she applied to the prestigious Zurich Polytechnic, since in Switzerland women were admitted to all classes. She passed the entrance exam and majored in mathematics. It was a small freshman class of about two-dozen students, she being the only woman. That’s where she met, in the even smaller physics course, fellow student, Albert Einstein.
One of the earliest pictures we have of Mileva is dated 1897. In this portrait, I see a very serious, confident, determined woman with large penetrating eyes, a full crop of dark wavy hair and full lips. I would call her plain but attractive. I say this, because I was shocked at several instances when someone, upon first meeting Mileva, is quoted as describing her as “ugly.”
As a fellow student, Albert Einstein was attracted to her, and they quickly became a couple. He probably was the first male to take a romantic interest in her, overlooking her “handicap.” I suspect he was attracted to her gutsy attitude and her smartness. Plus, being Serbian, Mileva exuded an exotic “otherness” to the “German” in Albert. They spent most of their free time together, studying and falling in love. She did well in her courses, initially passing all of them, as Albert did too (of course). That is, until she was pregnant – a fact she tried to hide until she could not. And so she went home to her parents to inform them of this, and eventfully to have the baby.
Her parents were very supportive, which was unusual for the times. A girl was born early in 1902; they named her Lieserl (probably a Yiddish diminutive of Liese, a shortened Elizabeth). Albert stayed in Zurich and never saw his daughter; she was raised by Mileva’s parents, as Mileva returned to Zurich to continue her studies. No one knows what ultimately happened to Lieserl; she has seemingly vanished from all records. She may have died from Scarlet Fever as a child; or, she may have been adopted and grew up. One thing I do know: Mileva never forgot her. I believe that the loss of Lieserl is the major reason for Mileva’s depression and lingering melancholia throughout her life – as will be seen. As a result, she didn’t take care of her grooming and was a bit overweight – as seen in photos of her later in life. This, I suspect, may be a source of her “ugliness.”
Back to Zurich in the late 1890s and her studies: she passed all her courses over the first three years, and in her fourth year she started her thesis, hoping for a diploma and further work toward a PhD. But in 1900 she failed her final exams, while the other male students all passed. In July 1901 she repeated her final exams and flunked them again. I find it hard to believe that this sudden change in her performance was due to the tests being too tough for this woman, in light of all we know of her up to this time. Look at the last date above: she was pregnant with her child. I’m convinced that she just couldn’t concentrate on her studies. Albert passed, graduated, and started looking for a job – as well as working toward his PhD.
On January 6, 1903, they were married in a small civil ceremony. Mileva became a housewife; no more thinking of going any further in her studies. She then became the mother of two boys: Hans Albert (born in 1904) and Eduard (nicknamed Tete; in 1910).
All that promise came to nothing, not even a university degree. If she had not met Albert, who knows what she would have achieved? But that was not the path taken, and since she married what became the most famous scientist of the 20th century – if not the most famous person, as Time Magazine said at the end of the millennium – that’s why there is a plethora of documentation about her life, terribly sad as it was.
Now briefly fast forward a century or so, to around 1987, and the publication of the early love letters between Albert and Mileva, which had only been known by a few, and purposely suppressed. For example, Hans Albert, who had the letters much earlier, had wanted to publish them. But he was thwarted by Helen Dukas and Otto Nathan, who threatened litigation. Dukas was Albert’s lifelong secretary and Nathan was an economist and close friend, who eventually was the executor of Einstein’s will. And so, the letters never surfaced until Dukas and Nathan were both dead.
Even today, writing about these letters is an ideological minefield. Here’s why. The letters date from 1899 to 1903, when a new theory of physics was brewing in Albert’s mind. The result, in the so-called miracle year of 1905, was the publication of five papers that changed physics forever: two on what became his Theory of Relativity; one on a particle theory (much later called a photon) of light, as part of the emerging Quantum Theory; and two supporting the reality of atoms, which were still only hypothetical entities at this time. Knowing this, how much can we read into the love letters when Albert, in talking about his scientific ideas, uses “we” and “our work”? Well, it seems, a lot; for the initial response from primarily feminist quarters was that Mileva should at least be seen as a co-author of the famous papers, since it seemed that they conceived of the theory together. Given, as we will see, Albert’s shabby treatment of her later in life, then all the more sympathy was directed toward Mileva and her plight by history. Indeed, some went so far (you will still find websites saying this) that Albert stole the theory of relativity from Mileva. Nonetheless, after that initial flurry of debate, the consensus has moved away from this viewpoint, so that today the select scholars looking over the Einstein Papers Project in Pasadena, California assert unabashedly that Mileva made no input to Albert’s theory.
Nonetheless, I am one of the few “Einstein scholars” (if I may call myself such), who gives Mileva some credit in the 1905 marvel. She was good at mathematics, she had patience in her life and work, and she was a thorough researcher – all qualities severely lacking in Albert. Let me put it this way: over his life as a physicist, Einstein hired a series of companions (whom he called “calculators”) to do the tedious and complicated mathematics required for his theory, especially as it developed over the later years with the use of tensor calculus in his General Theory of Relativity. All were men; except, famously, his last calculator was the Israeli-American woman, Buria Kaufmann – about whom you will read in the literature as his “first female calculator.” (Incidentally, there is a website giving her credit for Einstein’s later theory, which is complete fiction.) I, however, would assert that Buria was the second woman; for Mileva was Albert’s first “calculator.” She was also his researcher and proofreader. Since she knew the physics, as we know from the letters, she also was his sounding-board – Albert bouncing ideas off of Mileva, as they say.
So, what about Albert speaking of “we” and “our work”? Let me put this into context by quoting from some of the letters in chronological order. In a letter Mileva wrote to Helene Savić (née Kaufler), her closest and longest friend throughout her life (they roomed together in a boarding house in Zurich when they were students), she speaks of a paper “written” by Albert that will be published soon that is “very significant.” She then says that “we” sent it to an important physicist – revealing how much she was involved with Albert’s work. Later in a letter from Albert to Mileva, let me quote from the opening lines to give you a trace of their intimacy: “Thank you very much for your little letter and all the true love that’s in it. I kiss and hug you for it from all my heart, exactly the way you would want it & are entitled to, love.” He then goes into a discussion of other people, followed by his going back to how much they love each other, and ending with this key sentence. “How happy and proud I will be when the two of us together will have brought our work on the relative motion to a victorious conclusion.” I put in italics the famous (or is it infamous?) phrase: our work. But there’s nothing more on this, although a bit later in the letter he goes on to talk about another physics problem he is working on: specific heats. He discusses the physics problem in detail, with equations and his proposed solution, and he ends the topic with this: “Don’t forget to look up to what extent glass obeys the law of Dulong and Petit.” My guess is that it was this sort of task that was part of their work together. The letter ends where it began. “Tender greetings and kisses, my dear little dumpling, from your … Albert.”
I’ll leave the topic there, nonetheless aware of the possibility that Mileva did help Albert in even more significant ways, and that hence she’s been slighted by history.
Back to Zurich in 1903. Initially, their life together was harmonious, a reflection of the camaraderie in the love letters, as she kept house and raised her boys. But by around 1909, when Albert was being seen as an important physicist, there clearly was a severe strain on the marriage. For example, in a letter that year to Helene, she says that Albert “lives only for his work” and the family is “unimportant to him.” By 1914, when they moved to Berlin for Albert’s prestigious position at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Physics, their marriage entered a new phase. In fact, Albert had been having relations with a divorced cousin, Elsa Löwenthal, who lived in Berlin. Moreover, Albert made it clear to Mileva that their previous relationship was over. He went so far as to give her a list of demands: that she do the laundry, prepare him three meals a day, and keep his office clean – all without any personal relations. No intimacy in the house, and no being together in public. It was degradingly cruel: Mileva’s role was reduced to being a maid and cook. She tried to accept it, but quickly found that she couldn’t endure the humiliation; and so she took her two boys back to Zurich, where she remained for the rest of her life.
They officially divorced in 1919, and Albert immediately married Elsa – all in the same year that he became the world-famous scientist, because of the solar eclipse experiment that proved that light from a star is bent around the sun, as predicted by his theory. He got the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1921 and transferred the money to a bank in Zurich for the support of their boys, where Mileva had access to the interest in the account.
What happened after all that infatuation seen in the love letters and in their early life together? In retrospect, Mileva surely realized that she had ignored or overlooked what we might call the dark side of Albert. As a student he was overly sarcastic, often mocking and even degrading people whom he saw as inadequate or not too smart. He even teased her in ways that revealed an underlying hostility. When she pointed this out, he would laugh it off – and she’d forgive him. In a letter to Helena in 1900 she writes of Albert’s “wicked words with deeds! What an insolent boy he is, and yet I love him so much!” Telling words. Even after the acrimonious divorce, she still, as will be seen, was under Albert’s spell. I believe that she never got over that initial infatuation when they were students. It became a pattern: she was always trying to get on his good side.
Overall, Albert was very much a 19th century male chauvinist in his attitude and communications with women. Here are some of his words about women that reveal his overt misogyny: they are “passive, insecure, needy, and wanting to be dominated.” I knew that he liked to flirt with women throughout his life. But seeing him do so with other wives, with Mileva present, made it less frivolous and more malicious. In short, he was a cad and a rake, rolled into one.
The turnaround in their relationship seemed to bring out the worst in him. He was petty and vindictive, and especially very cruel towards her. There is no direct evidence of any real physical abuse. However, there was an incident in the spring of 1913 when a friend reported seeing Mileva with a badly swollen face, which was attributed to a “toothache” – and hence she and Albert missed some social events. Possibly the swollen face was a sign of something more malevolent, but we will never know the truth. Nonetheless, pondering this, I wish to quote something Albert wrote in a letter in 1925: “Not only children need a bit of thrashing, but also grownups and especially women.” And I’ll leave it there.
After the divorce, he accused her of poisoning his relationship with the boys – a common trope between divorcing couples. But it got more vicious as her financial situation became grave, and she asked for more money. She made some extra money tutoring students in math and giving piano lessons. But it wasn’t enough. Albert’s letters to her contain nasty personal attacks: saying she is “abnormal,” a “nonentity,” and that her pleading is “rubbish.” I can only imagine how Mileva felt being called this. At the time, she was in severe physical pain with chronic back problems, often forcing her into bed for long periods, even stays in hospital, when she was trying to raise two boys alone. Moreover, all this was exacerbated by problems in her Serbian family. Her sister Zorka was diagnosed as schizophrenic and was in and out of asylums; her only living brother disappeared into Russia after World War I; and her parents had serious financial problems.
Could it get any worse? It could. And it did. Tete became a handful. He was very bright and creative; he had musical talent on the piano, and he wrote promising poems and stories. But he was also prone to falling into depressive episodes, for apparently no reason – anger fits, throwing things, being out of control. I suppose Mileva saw this coming: Tete, like her sister, eventually was diagnosed as schizophrenic.
Albert, of course, knew all this, but being in Berlin, he didn’t have to deal with it. He did make occasional visits and took summer trips with the boys (giving Mileva short breaks), all while he was still living in Europe. But when he moved to Princeton, N.J., in 1933, with Hitler in power in Germany and Einstein’s name being high on a hit list, their meetings were over; until 1938, when Hans Albert (now with a wife and two children) moved to the USA. The last meeting between Albert and Tete is recorded in a 1933 photograph that bears a close look. Both are seated in a room, with Tete looking over a large, open portfolio – perhaps reading it. Albert is facing in a different direction (about 90-degrees away), holding a violin and bow, and staring off into space. It may be that Tete is reading to him, but more likely they are inhabiting two different worlds.
In the years during World War II, living in Zurich, Switzerland (a country surrounded by a Nazi-occupied Europe), Mileva was terrified that the Nazis would swoop up this last free space. Moreover, she knew that they were rounding up Jews by the trainloads and moving them to Concentration Camps. She was somewhat safe as an Orthodox Christian, but Tete was “Jewish,” being a child of Einstein. She wrote pleading letters to Albert, asking him to take Tete to the USA. She even contacted the Red Cross, and they agreed that the best bet was to get Albert to sponsor him. “Bring us to safety,” she wrote. But being Mileva – ever still the dutiful wife, even though they had been divorced for two decades – she added (and I assert that she was not being sarcastic in saying this), “[I am] not intending to disturb your peace and freedom.” Petrified that “Tete is in danger because he is your son,” she concluded: “you can’t just leave him in the lurch.”
In fact, Einstein, Dukas, and Nathan were diligently rescuing Jews from Europe by using Einstein’s name to get emigration papers and such. Albert once spoke of this, saying that they were running a little refugee office over his cluttered “lawyer’s desk.” And they did save lives. Relevant here is a 1939 letter from Albert to Helena on this very topic. Helena’s father was Jewish, and she had numerous relatives whose lives were in peril, and so apparently, she was asking Albert for help. He wrote in response. “How gladly would I help! But I am desperately trying to at least get younger people out. Relocation of old people must under present horrible conditions be set aside.” In the end, we know of two aunts of Helena who died in gas chambers. Interestingly, in this same letter, Albert mentions that Hans is now in America, but that Tete is with Mileva in Zurich, saying that Tete is “incurably mentally ill.”
So, what about Tete? And Mileva’s pleading letters? As far as we know, these pleading requests were never answered. Albert, it seems, did leave his son “in the lurch.” My guess is that he just couldn’t fathom the chaos in his life of dealing with someone with such a severe mental illness. Listen to what he later wrote to Hans about Tete after learning of Mileva’s death. “If I had been fully informed [apparently referring here to what he saw as a genetic mental illness in Mileva’s family], he [Tete] would never have come into the world.” I can only imagine how Hans must have felt after reading these appalling words from his father about his beloved brother. Sometimes Albert’s behavior is plainly pathetic. Fortunately, the Nazis never invaded Switzerland.
Much of Mileva’s adult life was centred on Tete, as she watched him descend into the depths of mental illness. Overweight and chain-smoking, he was in and out of mental institutions. For Mileva, he was a full-time job. She, being the caring mother, was obsessed with making sure he would be safe after she died. And she succeeded; for seven years after his mother died, he lived in the renowned Burghölzli psychiatric clinic in Zurich. He was 55 when he died.
I believe Mileva never got over two things: the loss of Lieserl and her infatuation with Albert. We don’t know what happened to Lieserl; but Mileva surely did, and it haunted her all of her life; as seen, she flunked her final chance for a university degree because of it. Lieserl was a source of her constant despondent behaviour and possibly her so-called “ugliness.” In a letter to Helena in 1925 she wrote of “my unfulfilled desire for a daughter”– another telling phrase, since she had a daughter, but was forced to abandon her.
Regarding Albert, no matter how abusive he was, Mileva still was open to forgiveness. She once asked herself this question: “When has a man ever listened to reason, when a woman is involved?” She should have listened to her own words.
Mileva Marić died on August 4, 1948, at the age of 72.
This story of Albert falling in and out of love with Mileva was not the first such episode in his life. It was previewed by and even overlapped with his first sweetheart: Marie Winteler.
In 1895 he spent a year enrolled in the cantonal school in the town of Aarau, near Zurich. He had taken the rigorous entrance exams for the Polytechnic (which Mileva later passed) and had flunked the non-science and non-math parts. But since he did so well on the science and math parts, it was recommended that he do a year of make-up in Aarau; plus, he was applying at age 16, a year early. He boarded with the family of Jost Winteler, a teacher at the school. Jost and Pauline had three daughters, the prettiest being Marie, two years older than Albert. Albert quickly fell for her, and she for him. She was an accomplished pianist, and so their love interests were supplemented with piano and violin duets. After that year, and after passing the entrance requirement at the Polytechnic, Albert moved to Zurich – where he met Mileva, and then broke off with Marie. In short, he jilted her, as he would later do with Mileva.
Marie, however, thought the relationship was to be forever, and wrote pleading letters when he stopped writing to her. After all, he was still mailing her his dirty laundry to wash and send back. (I am not making this up.) Being deeply hurt, she fell into a depression that (may have) plagued her throughout her life. She became a schoolteacher (whose records show that she missed a lot of classes due to sickness); in 1911 she married a man whose first name was Albert. They had two boys, but divorced in 1927. We also know that she tried to reach the first Albert in the 1940s about emigrating to the USA, but there is no record of his having received her letters. (Albert’s secretary was known to censor his mail.) She died in a mental institution in 1957, two years after Einstein died.
I mention this for two reasons. One, the obvious – this being a preview to the story of Albert’s shabby treatment of Mileva and the parallel terrible consequences. The other reason is the dirty laundry. This, also obviously, needs to be explained.
In 2019 I published an historical novel on Einstein’s life, called A Solitary Smile. In it, Marie is one of the characters, especially near the end and in a dream sequence that has Einstein recalling their time together, where he realizes how he hurt her. In recalling this part of my book, while writing this story of Mileva, and now Marie again – I suddenly realized that I didn’t include the dirty laundry bit. Why? I knew it then, as I do now. So why not mention it? Ruminating on this, I can only surmise that I was subconsciously protecting Albert from more scorn. Why dig up all the dirt (seemingly, literally in this case). How interesting this is. Me, being part of the problem. Protecting Albert’s image.
Well, I caught myself. And here I acknowledge my error – to supplement my saga on the dark side of Albert Einstein.
* * *
Readings: Mileva Marić Einstein: Life with Albert Einstein, by Radmila Milentijević (United World Press, 2010). In Albert’s Shadow: The Life and Letters of Mileva Marić: Einstein’s First Wife, edited by Milan Popović (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). A Solitary Smile: A Novel on Einstein, by David R. Topper (Bee Line Press, 2019).
Features
With Einstein and Darwin
By David R. Topper A significant part of my adult intellectual life has been spent studying and teaching about the life and works of Albert Einstein. This led to my publishing various works about this fascinating, often frustrating man. Just as fervently, but not nearly to the same extreme, I’ve studied and taught about Charles Darwin. But I never published anything on him.
Since Einstein came after Darwin, the question often occurred to me as to whether Einstein ever read, thought, or wrote about Darwin. Indeed, I’ve gone as far as posing the following proposition to myself: Maybe, if Einstein had read and absorbed Darwin’s discovery about the astonishingly dynamical and unpredictable way the natural world works, then he may have been less rigid in his thoughts about the order and structure of the universe. In fact, I could go so far as to conclude that, if he had, then in 1916 he might not have made the erroneous assumption in his model of the cosmos, which he later called the “biggest blunder of my life” (quoted in Topper, p.165).
But I’m getting ahead of my story and I need to start with some basic questions. Did Einstein know about Darwin, and if so, what? In searching through the literature on this possible juxtaposition of these two giants in their fields, as far as I can tell, I’m the first person seriously to pose this issue in some detail – which was a big surprise. It certainly gave me an incentive to pursue this diligently. Thus I did, and here is what I found – plus, at the very end, I add a zany speculation about the nature of the universe, as we know it today.
The names “Einstein” and “Darwin” are seldom juxtaposed, except in a general sense, such as when comparing Einstein’s theory of relativity with Darwin’s on evolution – as overall examples of major ideas in recent centuries. Going through all the indexes of the many dozen books on Einstein that I own, looking for “Darwin” – in the few times I found the name, the reference was always to a general comment about him as a scientist, with nothing about the content of his theory. At most, I found that Albert had read Darwin, which is important to know, but I found little information on what the theory meant to him or what he got out of it.
Hence, I began a journey to see if I could find more, since it seems that I’m the first ever to explore – or even ask – about Einstein and Darwin. My next question was: do we know when Albert was first exposed to Darwin’s theory, and what did he learn? The earliest time I found was during the school year 1895 to 1896, when he was in Aarau, Switzerland, taking remedial high school before enrolling in the Polytechnic in nearby Zurich. We know that the Swiss school he attended was very progressive and it taught Darwin’s theory of evolution. It’s worth quoting something he said much later, when looking back on those years:
“By its liberal spirit and by the austere earnestness of its teachers … this school made an unforgettable impression on me; by comparison with six years of schooling in an authoritarian German Gymnasium [i.e. High School]. … I became acutely aware how much an education directed toward freedom of action and responsibility is superior to an education resting on drill, imposed authority, and ambition (quoted in Ohanian, p.9).”
During his next four years in Zurich at the Polytechnic, we know that among the many physics and math books that Einstein read, he also read Darwin – but we don’t know the details (Pais, p.44). Thus, as we move into the 20th century, at least we can say that he knew something about Darwin’s theory.
My next source to explore was the Collected Papers of Einstein, which are at present up to May 1929, when Albert was age 50. Over all those years, there are only a few places where the name Darwin appears. There is a book review he wrote in 1917, where the author mentions Darwin. Next, is a letter from a colleague in 1918, who talks about Darwin’s theory in passing, while making comments on society and politics. The only place where Einstein himself talks about the content of the theory is in the Third Appendix to his popular book, Relativity: the Special and the General Theory, which he added around 1920. That’s all there is. Albert died in March 1955, so there are still 26 years to go for the Collected Papers, but I’m not optimistic that anything significant will surface therein. Yet, who knows?
Using what I have, let’s explore this topic further, beginning with this appendix. The title is: “The Experimental Confirmation of the General Theory of Relativity.” Einstein begins with a brief foray into epistemology in science: induction and deduction. As science progresses over time, the inductive accumulation of empirical data occasionally needs to be supplemented by deductive ideas logically based upon a few given axioms; and from this there emerges a “system of thought” or a “theory.” The justification for the very existence of the theory is the fact that it correlates with a range of observations (empirical data) and “it is just here that the ‘truth’ of the theory lies (Einstein, p. 124).” He puts the word ‘truth’ in quotes because, as is often the case, there may be several such theories competing for an explanation of the same data. The ultimate goal of this for him is, of course, the issue of his general theory of relativity to explain gravity, in competition with the old theory of Newton. But before he delves into that – which constitutes the rest of the Appendix – he makes this aside comment on biology.
“As an example, a case of general interest is available in the province of biology, in the Darwinian theory of the development of species by selection in the struggle for existence, and in the theory of development which is based on the hypothesis of the hereditary transmission of acquired characteristics (Einstein, p. 124).”
That’s it. As far as I know, that is the only direct statement about Darwin’s ideas that Einstein ever wrote. Let’s look closer at this, for we will need it later. First, I want to point out another way of putting this. Einstein is contrasting the difference between Charles Darwin’s random selection method of evolution, with Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s developmental process, which had a predetermined direction or goal for the evolutionary process. Thus, Darwin’s “struggle for existence” revealed the dynamical nature of plants and animals as they change over a long time-period. I’m assuming that Einstein realized all this, along with the lack of a specific direction for the evolutionary process according to Darwin. I just wish Einstein had said more; but we go with what is given. Moreover, the stage has now been set for why I have raised the name of Darwin in the first place.
In 1915 Einstein published his landmark paper on the general theory of relativity, which was essentially an explanation of gravity. Whereas Newton had pictured gravity as an invisible attractive force between all the elements of matter throughout the universe (from rocks to planets and stars), Einstein pictured it as a four-dimensional curvature of space (or, more precisely, space-time) around all those elements. Although Einstein’s paper constitutes pages and pages of tensor calculus equations, the conceptual image is quite simple. A rock is not falling to earth by an invisible attractive power; rather, the rock is simply moving into a dimple in space.
After completing this arduous task of many years, Einstein immediately wrote the popular account of the entire theory of relativity for the general reader, with a minimum of mathematics. In his Preface to the first edition, dated December 1916, he ends with this: “May the book bring some one a few happy hours of suggestive thought!” It was the Third Appendix to that work that I quoted above.
Next, he made a prediction. Still in 1916, from his general relativity theory, he wrote another paper, predicting the existence of gravitational waves. Over his lifetime such waves were never found, and in his latter years he doubted that they ever would be – since they are so infinitesimal in nature. But in 2015, almost exactly a century after their prediction, gravitational waves were detected by the clever design of a very big experimental apparatus that was necessary to find these minuscule waves. The three scientists who designed and did the experiment got the Nobel Prize two years later.
Back to 1916, for Einstein was not yet done. The entire enterprise had triggered another thought, and yet another paper. It started with a question. If the space around all elements of matter is bent locally, what does this say about the universe as a whole? Thus, Einstein went back to those equations for locally bending space and – so to speak – he summed them up for the space of the entire universe. In doing so, he found that the resulting universe – unlike the infinite space of Newton and others after him – was finite, since all space curves back into itself. It was as if we were living on the surface of a four-dimensional sphere of finite size. This finite universe was okay with Albert; he saw it as just another discovery that he made.
Yet there was a problem: according to the equations, the whole thing was unstable, due to the gravitational attraction among all the elements of matter. Such a universe would slowly collapse – and that would not do. Surely, the universe was stable; and so, in order to save this theory – after all those years of gruelling work – he stabilized the equation by adding another term; this term symbolized another force, having an equal and opposite repulsive power that balanced the two, and hence stabilized the universe. He called it the cosmological constant. To him, this was another discovery; that is, it was just another constant in nature. All this he published in 1917, and it formed the basis of a new cosmology. Indeed, all modern cosmology goes back to these landmark papers on general relativity by Einstein. Over the next decade, there were a few challenges to his model; particularly around the cosmological constant. Einstein did not see all of them, but the ones he saw, he rejected – thus holding fast to a stable universe.
Also, around this time, Einstein had another bright idea. Since the first decade of the 20th century, when he published his first papers on relativity, he also published major papers on the parallel theory of the atomic constitution of matter; namely, the quantum theory. His other bright idea, which absorbed his scientific attention starting in the 1920s, was to unite the two (relativity and quantum) into a unified theory of everything. He eventually called it the “unified field theory,” and it became his key obsession for the rest of his life.
In the meantime, by the start of the 1930s, he was forced to reconsider his cosmological model. It began in the summer of 1930, when he received an honorary degree from Cambridge University, where he met Arthur Eddington – the astronomer who had led the solar eclipse experiments that proved Einstein’s relativity theory in 1919, by measuring the bending of light from a star around the sun, as predicted by Einstein. Eddington now was familiar with important results coming from American astronomers, such as the work of Edwin Hubble at the Mt. Wilson observatory near the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) – holding the largest telescope in the world at that time. The results, as Eddington interpreted them, meant that the universe was expanding. It was as if that four-dimensional sphere was a balloon being blown up. Since this model contained a force of expansion outward, then no cosmological constant was needed. The universe was, indeed, unstable – and as well, expanding over time.
Serendipitously, at this time, Einstein was on his way to Caltech for three winter sojourns (1930-1933). While at Caltech on his first visit, he therefore had to abandon his commitment to the static model. He was quoted in the American press as saying that his old model was “smashed … like a hammer blow,” and he swung his arm with a fist while declaring this (Topper, p 174). Never again did he bring up the cosmological constant. In the early 1950s, when the topic arose in cosmology again, he was questioned about it: and, as mentioned before, he called the use of that constraint “the biggest blunder of my life.” (I should note here that in recent years it’s been discovered that this expansion of the universe is, in fact, accelerating. Hence, another repulsive force must be added, which today is called ‘dark energy’. Ironically, this may be seen as just another way of bringing back Einstein’s cosmological constant. Perhaps it wasn’t a mistake, after all.)
It’s important here to remember that Einstein’s extraordinary contributions to physics, ranging from his own theory of relativity to a wide range of topics in quantum physics, lasted from around 1905 into the mid-1920s. By then he became obsessed with his unified field theory, and essentially ignored all other important new fields, such as nuclear physics. Although popular culture likes to juxtapose an image of him with his halo of hair next to a mushroom cloud from a nuclear bomb – for example, the cover of Time magazine for July 1, 1946 – in fact, he made nary an iota of input to the actual development of that important branch of 20th century physics. This runs counter to what you may be told in popular accounts of Einstein’s life and work, such as on TV and in the movies. (Yes, I know about that little equation about energy and mass that Einstein is famous for. It was there in those early years of the quantum physics of subatomic particles. Nevertheless, it’s a very long haul from that seemingly innocent equation, through decades of work in nuclear physics, and then designing technological contraptions to making a bomb or any other applications for nuclear energy. All of which was done without Einstein. Incidentally, in that famous Time cover, E = mc2 is embedded in the mushroom cloud.)
More importantly, as quantum physics evolved into quantum mechanics around the mid-1930s, Einstein vehemently rejected the statistical nature of the subject. Although he himself, starting around 1905, had published many important papers using statistics within the quantum world, he interpreted it as a limit imposed by the experimental tools that we have in probing the subatomic world. To him the statistical features were not a part of the world itself, which is – at least, potentially – completely predictable. Yet by the 1930s, especially as expounded by his friend the Danish physicist Niels Bohr and others, the quantum mechanical interpretation of the statistical nature of the equations was that the underlying subatomic world itself was statistical in nature, and had no predetermined or predictable order. Only probabilistic statements can be made about that minuscule world – and that was its fundamental nature, according to quantum mechanics.
Einstein would have none of this. To make an analogy that I believe he would like: consider the use of statistics in actuarial tables by insurance companies, in order to predict the behaviour of groups of people, since individual behaviour can’t be predicted. Using Bohr’s interpretation of statistics in quantum mechanics, there would be no real people – only probable people! However, for Einstein electrons (along with other subatomic particles), like people are real. And so, the fact that quantum mechanics must rely upon statistics to work, means that the theory is incomplete. The problem is with the theory, not the world. Indeed, he believed that one result of achieving his unified field theory someday, would be the deduction of a complete, predictable and real subatomic world. That was another reason to pursue his quest.
In the closest writing to an autobiography, which Einstein penned in 1946, he said this: “Beyond the self, there is this vast world, which exists independently of human beings, and that stands before us like a great, eternal riddle” (Topper, p.10, italics mine). Nonetheless, Bohr’s viewpoint prevailed amongst most physicists. Hence, Einstein fought a losing battle to the end of his life.
What all this shows is that throughout his life, the concepts of stability, predictability, and order were fundamental in Einstein’s picture of the universe – the way he believed his one equation for the unified field theory (if found!) would unite the worlds of relativity and quantum physics. He died in 1955 without finding this equation. Nevertheless, the quest continues, with myriad physicists today searching for, what they now call, a theory of everything.
Now back to cosmology. We now know – and by “now” I mean in only the last few years – that the universe is much more dynamical than it was ever imagined to be, even with all this expanding and accelerating going on. Stars group together as galaxies, and galaxies group together into larger clusters, due to their gravitational attractions. But – and this was realized with the help of the Hubble and now the James Webb telescopes – galaxies merge and interact in a process producing new galaxies. One might call it an internal dynamical change among the galaxies that we never knew about, until now. Closest to home, consider our Milky Way galaxy, where “we” – namely our solar system, with a star (our sun) at the centre – are near the outer edge. Being far from the black hole at the centre of our galaxy, it’s a rather quiet place (astronomically speaking) – and hence life was able to take hold and evolve into what we have today. This will go on until our sun runs its course. Our star is now almost halfway through its 10-billion-year cycle. In about 0.5 – 1.5 billion years, as it starts running out of hydrogen fuel for nuclear fusion, it will expand into a “red giant” that will encompass the orbits of Mercury, Venus, and our Earth – and hence all life as we know it will end. (Unless, of course, humans, with their nuclear weapons, hasten that event.) After that, the sun will collapse into a cold “white dwarf.”
Independently of all this, and on a larger scale, our Milky Way is part of a group of galaxies, the largest being the so-called Andromeda Nebulae, visible as a smudge to the naked eye. Due to gravity, these two galaxies are on a collision course, moving closer at the rate of 110 kilometers per second. They will meet in about 3.5 billion years, long after life has ended here. At the same time, a much smaller galaxy, M33 (also called the Triangulum Galaxy) will also take part, along with the Large Magellanic Cloud (another nearby small galaxy), which may join in on this merger. What happens next is not clear, since we need much more information from the Hubble and the James Webb telescopes. Even so, we will never know if any prediction is true or not, since no humans will be around to see all this happen!
Nonetheless, we do know a lot about such an event. Importantly, I need to clarify what we mean by a collision of galaxies. Or, maybe better said: what we don’t mean. There will be no fireworks, like clashing and exploding stars. To understand this, we must realize this fact: although from a huge distance, any galaxy looks like a compact mass of stars, in reality the individual stars are extremely far apart. As an example, consider our sun and the closest star, Proxima Centauri, which is about 4.2 light-years away. If the sun were a ping-pong ball, Proxima Centauri would be a pea about 1100 kilometres away. And so it goes throughout our galaxy and beyond, with all the other galaxies. In short, the universe is mainly empty space – strange as that may seem. Accordingly, when galaxies merge and form larger ones, there are no fireworks – just a different arrangement of the way stars group together. As for our Milky Way and Andromeda collision – along with the smaller ones – they may just pass through each other, and go on their astronomical ways. Or not. There are several possible groupings that may take place among these merging galaxies in the distant future. All this may be seen by some sentient beings on a planet in orbit around a star, both of optimum size, and in a quiet place similar to us in the Milky Way, such that a life-form evolved to our state of self-consciousness. What would they make of all this?
Now, bringing all this back to the present, and recent past: with Einstein & Darwin. So, here’s my bright idea. Thanks especially to the James Webb space telescope, and thus having this most recent information about how dynamical the universe really is – and, thankfully, not having an obsession with order and stasis – I find myself speculating about the process of galaxies merging and interacting, thus giving rise to new dominant ones and eliminating the old. As such, I picture this as an evolutionary process of survival and extinction – Darwinian in nature. A struggle for existence among the galaxies. A random process producing new galaxies throughout the universe, with no predetermined direction or goal. As such, it’s parallel to Darwin’s notion of natural selection. But now writ large (very large!), to encompass the entire universe and everything in it.
This, at least, is what all this information is telling me. Makes sense, I say.
What would Einstein say? Or Darwin? What do you think?
As a kind of footnote to this essay, I want to point this out: I know where most of Einstein’s commitment to the structured and ordered universe came from. It was his adulation of the Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza. I too read Spinoza’s Ethics, and was in awe of the depth of logic entailed in this incredible but difficult work. Unlike all other philosophers that Einstein read – and he read many; remember, he was educated in a 19th century German system – he never critiqued Spinoza. Rather, he absorbed the arguments from the Ethics for his views of the world, as well as for his theology. However, I, with my understanding of history, am able to see how Spinoza’s book was squarely centered in the world-view of the 17th century – not the present world that I live in. Too bad Albert didn’t do the same.
* * *
Bibliography:
Einstein, Albert. Relativity: the Special and the General Theory. A Popular Exposition. Translated by Robert W. Lawson. London: Methuen & Co., 1920. I’m using the paperback reprint of 1977.
Ohanian, Hans C. Einstein’s Mistakes: The Human Failings of Genius. New York: W. W. Norton, 2008.
Pais, Abraham. “Subtle is the Lord”: The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein. New York:Oxford University Press, 1982.
Topper, David. How Einstein Created Relativity out of Physics and Astronomy. New York: Springer, 2013.
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David R. Topper writes in Winnipeg, Canada. His work has appeared in Mono, Poetic Sun, Discretionary Love, Poetry Pacific, Academy of the Heart & Mind, Altered Reality Mag., and elsewhere. His poem Seascape with Gulls: My Father’s Last Painting won first prize in the annual poetry contest of CommuterLit Mag. May 12, 2025.
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Features
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Features
Democratic Socialists of America to Demand Mamdani Implement Extreme Anti-Israel Agenda
The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the largest socialist organization in the US which counts prominent politicians among its ranks, intends to pressure New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani to implement a series of extreme anti-Israel policies when he officially enters office, according to a new report.
JusttheNews.com obtained and published internal plans detailing how the Anti-War Working Group (AWWG) of the DSA’s branch in New York City has been plotting for weeks to push Mamdani, a member of the DSA and self-declared democratic socialist, to impose its agenda from City Hall in Manhattan.
The five-page document, titled “AWWG Palestine Policy Meeting Meeting Agenda & Notes [sic],” outlines a policy agenda that includes 12 demands for the Mamdani administration, each of which target institutions with ties to Israel.
The group plans to urge City Hall to divest New York City pension funds from Israeli bonds and securities, withdraw municipal deposits from banks that lend to or do business in Israel, and terminate all city contracts with companies that do business with Israel.
The proposals, described as “demands” in the document, further call for city-run grocery stores to exclude Israeli products and for investigations into real estate agents allegedly involved in the sale of “stolen” West Bank land.
Additional measures outlined in the document include evicting weapons manufacturers and transporters from the New York City metro area, revoking the nonprofit status of charities that fundraise for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), and directing the City University of New York (CUNY) to divest its endowment while reinstating professors fired over what DSA described as pro-Palestinian activism.
The agenda also seeks to dismantle outgoing Mayor Eric Adams’s NYC–Israel Economic Council, end New York City Police Department (NYPD) training programs with Israeli security forces, halt police “repression of demonstrators,” and even pursue the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and IDF soldiers on war-crimes charges.
The proposals, organizers noted, are part of an effort to strengthen DSA’s anti-Israel platform and align city policy with the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement, which seeks to isolate the world’s lone Jewish state on the international state as a step toward its eventual elimination.
Mamdani, who has made anti-Israel activism a cornerstone of his young political career, has repeatedly declared his support for both the BDS movement and arresting Netanyahu if he visits New York — the latter of which he does not have authority to do, according to legal experts.
Meanwhile, the DSA has formally endorsed the BDS movement and earlier this year adopted a resolution that makes various actions in support of Israel, such as “making statements that ‘Israel has a right to defend itself’” and “endorsing statements equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism,” an “expellable offense,” subject to a vote by the DSA’s National Political Committee.
DSA’s lofty ambitions for New York City may face political hurdles, however.
US Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY), one of the most vocal allies of Israel in the US Congress, warned that he would not hesitate to launch an investigation into the Mamdani administration if it were to adopt the slate of anti-Israel directives.
“As Chair of the Middle East and North Africa subcommittee on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, I will be watching closely and will conduct hearings if @ZohranKMamdani and New York City engage in policy detrimental to US Foreign Policy,” Lawler posted on social media.
US President Donald Trump has previously warned that he could deprive the city of federal funds, arguing that Mamdani would be an “economic disaster” for the Big Apple.
“If Communist Candidate Zohran Mamdani wins the Election for Mayor of New York City, it is highly unlikely that I will be contributing Federal Funds, other than the very minimum as required, to my beloved first home, because of the fact that, as a Communist, this once great City has ZERO chance of success, or even survival!” Trump wrote on social media.
During his tenure in the New York State Assembly, Mamdani advocated on behalf of the BDS agenda. In the closing stretch of his mayoral campaign, however, Mamdani remained largely mum on whether he supported a divestment of city resources from Israel.
One reason by could be the economic consequences of actually implementing BDS could be disatrious for New York City. Late last month, a new report revealed that Israeli firms pour billions of dollars and tens of thousands of jobs into the local economy.
The study from the United States-Israel Business Alliance revealed that, based on 2024 data, 590 Israeli-founded companies directly created 27,471 jobs in New York City last year and indirectly created over 50,000 jobs when accounting for related factors, such as buying and shipping local products.
These firms generated $8.1 billion in total earnings, adding an estimated $12.4 billion in value to the city’s economy and $17.9 billion in total gross economic output.
As for the State of New York overall, the report, titled the “2025 New York – Israel Economic Impact Report,” found that 648 Israeli-founded companies generated $8.6 billion in total earnings and $19.5 billion in gross economic output, contributing a striking $13.3 billion in added value to the economy. These businesses also directly created 28,524 jobs and a total of 57,145 when accounting for related factors.
While it remains unlikely that Mamdani could entirely divest the city from Israel, an analysis conducted by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency found that he would be able to “stack the boards of two of the city’s five pension funds such that divestment from Israel could be on the table.”
Some of the DSA’s other goals, such as removing city funds from banks that do business with Israel, could be legally difficult. For example, some observers have noted that political discrimination against banks based on nationality could violate state and federal commerce and anti-discrimination laws. The Trump administration and federal lawmakers have already signaled that they will launch investigations against Mamdani if he were to weaponize mayoral powers against entities tied to Israel.
Further complicating the DSA’s efforts could be a New York State executive order which requires state agencies to divest from companies and institutions supporting the BDS movement.
The DSA policing demands could potentially have an easier time being implemented, as the police commissioner is appointed by the mayor and a new selection by Mamdani could share similar views.