TITHONUS' DIARY!!
New - Archives - Profile - Notes - Email - Design - Diaryland |
|
Einstein's wife Saw a program the other day about the contribution that Einstein's first wife made to his his work. Actually, that's sort of the wrong way to put it, I think. - Because it turns out, after having watched the program, that I am thoroughly convinced that she, Mileva Maric, deserves at least equal credit for the most significant of the work that has traditionally been considered his. Now, maybe this program is just a very cleverly constructed piece of propaganda, but as far as I could tell, the arguments made by the pro-Maric camp were very cogent and sensible, whereas the arguments made by the anti-Maric camp basically went, "But, she's a woman, how could she possibly have come up original ideas??!! How can you even suggest something so outrageous!!??" - I won't go into all the details of the argument (although a very good summary can be found here) but consider this one small piece of it; Einstein's work, the work on which his reputation as a genius was founded, was all done in a single year, 1905. Three papers were published which contain all the innovative elements of his life's work. All of his later work consisted of developing or extrapolating ideas that were already implicit in those three papers from 1905. Now, if this creative work was done in collaboration with Maric, this would certainly go a long way to explaining why he never produced anything innovative again in all the long years of his later career, wouldn't it? (In 1905, Einstein was 26 and Maric was 29). - That's it. It's very late and I'm meant to be working on a presentation that I'm giving tomorrow. - "I was born with a plastic spoon in my mouth" - The Who |
Previous / Next |