Brenda Maddox
He Promised Her the Nobel Prize
Einstein in Love: A Scientific Romance
By Dennis Overbye
Bloomsbury 416pp £18.99 order from our bookshop
The mistitling of this book reveals the problem of scientific biography. Albert Einstein was in love with one thing – physics. Everything else was secondary, which is why his relations with women and his children were so painfully skewed. If a man’s thoughts are absorbed in calculating the gravity of all the mass and energy in the universe with its radius of 10 million light years, matters of the heart take a poor second place.Einstein (born in Ulm in 1875) was not immune to women’s charms, nor they to his dark good looks. He married in 1903 but not before producing an illegitimate daughter and causing his partner, Mileva Maric, a Hungarian fellow student at the Zurich Federal Polytechnic, sad months of lonely waiting.
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