Einstein (45 page)

Einstein left the meeting at Haber’s house and went directly to the home of Elsa’s parents, who were also his aunt and uncle. They arrived home late from dinner to find him there, and they received the news about the situation with “a mild distaste.” Nevertheless, he ended up staying at their house. Elsa was on summer vacation in the Bavarian Alps with her two daughters, and Einstein wrote to inform her that he was now sleeping in her bed in the apartment upstairs. “It’s peculiar how confusingly sentimental one gets,” he told her. “It is just a bed like any other, as though you had never slept in it. And yet I find it comforting.”
She had invited him to visit her in the Bavarian Alps, but he said he could not, “for fear of damaging your reputation again.”
⁸³

The way to a divorce had now been paved, he assured Elsa, and he called it “a sacrifice” he had made on her behalf. Mari
would move back to Zurich and take custody of the two boys, and when they came to visit their father they could meet only on “neutral ground,” not in any house he shared with Elsa. “This is justified,” Einstein conceded to Elsa, “because it is not right to have the children see their father with a woman other than their own mother.”

The prospect of parting with his children was devastating for Einstein. He pretended to be detached from personal sentiments, and sometimes he was. But he became deeply emotional as he imagined life apart from his sons. “I would be a real monster if I felt any other way,” he wrote Elsa. “I have carried these children around innumerable times day and night, taken them out in their pram, played with them, romped around and joked with them. They used to shout with joy when I came; the little one cheered even now, because he was still too small to grasp the situation. Now they will be gone forever, and their image of their father is being spoiled.”
⁸⁴

Mari
and the two boys left Berlin, accompanied by Michele Besso, aboard the morning train to Zurich on Wednesday, July 29, 1914. Haber went to the station with Einstein, who “bawled like a little boy” all afternoon and evening. It was the most wrenching personal moment for a man who took perverse pride in avoiding personal moments. For all of his reputation of being inured to deep human attachments, he had been madly in love with Mileva Mari
and bonded to his children. For one of the few times in his adult life, he found himself crying.

The next day he went to visit his mother, who cheered him up. She had never liked Mari
and was delighted that she was gone. “Oh, if your poor Papa had only lived to see it!” she said about the separation. She even professed herself pleased for Elsa, although they had occasionally clashed. And Elsa’s mother and father also seemed happy enough with the resolution, though they did express resentment that Einstein had been too financially generous to Mari
, which meant the income left for him and Elsa might be “a bit meager.”
⁸⁵

The whole ordeal left Einstein so drained that, despite what he had said to Elsa just a week earlier, he decided that he was not prepared to get married again. Thus he would not have to force the issue of a legal divorce, which Mari
fiercely resisted. Elsa, still on vacation, was “bitterly disappointed” by the news. Einstein sought to reassure her. “For me there is no other female creature besides you,” he wrote. “It is not a lack of true affection which scares me away again and again from marriage! Is it a fear of the comfortable life, of nice furniture, of the odium that I burden myself with or even of becoming some sort of contented bourgeois? I myself don’t know; but you will see that my attachment to you will endure.”

He insisted that she should not feel ashamed or let people pity her for consorting with a man who would not marry her. They would take walks together and be there for each other. Should she choose to offer even more, he would be grateful. But by not marrying, they would be protecting themselves from lapsing into a “contented bourgeois” existence and preventing their relationship “from becoming banal and from growing pale.” To him, marriage was confining, which was a state he instinctively resisted. “I’m glad our delicate relationship does not have to founder on a provincial narrow-minded lifestyle.”
⁸⁶

In the old days, Mari
had been the type of soul mate who responded to such bohemian sentiments. Elsa was not such a person. A comfortable life with comfortable furniture appealed to her. So did marriage. She would accept his decision not to get married for a while, but not forever.

In the meantime, Einstein became embroiled in a long-distance battle with Mari
over money, furniture, and the way she was allegedly “poisoning” their children against him.
⁸⁷
And all around them, a chain reaction was taking Europe into the most incomprehensibly bloody war in its history.

Not surprisingly, Einstein reacted to all of this turmoil by throwing himself into his science.

After Einstein formulated his special theory of relativity in 1905, he realized that it was incomplete in at least two ways. First, it held that no physical interaction can propagate faster than the speed of light; that conflicted with Newton’s theory of gravity, which conceived of gravity as a force that acted instantly between distant objects. Second, it applied only to constant-velocity motion. So for the next ten years, Einstein engaged in an interwoven effort to come up with a new field theory of gravity and to generalize his relativity theory so that it applied to accelerated motion.
¹

His first major conceptual advance had come at the end of 1907, while he was writing about relativity for a science yearbook. As noted earlier, a thought experiment about what a free-falling observer would feel led him to embrace the principle that the local effects of being accelerated and of being in a gravitational field are indistinguishable.
*
A person in a closed windowless chamber who feels his feet pressed to the floor will not be able to tell whether it’s because the chamber is in outer space being accelerated upward or because it is at rest in a gravitational field. If he pulls a penny from his pocket and lets it go, it will fall to the floor at an accelerating speed in either case. Likewise, a person who feels she is floating in the closed chamber will not know whether it’s because the chamber is in free fall or hovering in a gravity-free region of outer space.
²