Mileva Marić Einstein and her contribution to Albert Einstein's work

Was Mileva Maric, the first wife of Albert Einstein, the well kept secret of Einstein's success? The relationship with Mileva Maric corresponds with Einstein's most productive period of life. In a single year, 1905, Einstein published four most important papers of his career, and won the 1921 Nobel Prize for that work. He spent the last 30 years of his life working on a unified field theory, but never succeeded. He was never again as successful as when he was with Mileva.

Albert Einstein was born in 1879 in Germany and died in 1955 in USA. Albert Einstein won the 1921 Nobel Prize for physics "for his services to theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of photoelectric effect."

The most important year of his life was 1905, when he published four revolutionary articles in 'Annalen der Physik,' the leading physics journal in Europe at that time. Within seven months he published papers in three different fields in physics:

"Quantum of light and photoelectric effect" in March,

"Brownian motion and atomic theory" in May,

"The special theory of relativity" in June, and

"Equivalence of mass and energy" in September

In the same time Albert was working 6 days a week at the Patent office in Bern, and preparing his dissertation on determining the number and size of ions. Was it possible for one man to have the entire job done, or he had a helper besides him?

The New Science article from March 1990 "Was the first Mrs. Einstein a genius too?" shows that more and more evidence is discovered to sustain the idea that Mileva Maric was a major contributor to Einstein's work from the crucial period in his career.

Mileva and Albert met in 1896 as students at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zu...

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...ved is that the original manuscripts of the papers submitted in 1905 are missing. Also, the person that claims that he saw the originals, Abraham F. Joffe, and that the papers were signed as Einstein-Marity, died in 1960. We are only left to believe or not, to what he wrote in his book "Uspehi fizicheskih nauk" about these originals. Some even claim that the reason Albert gave Mileva the entire amount of the Nobel prize was to keep her silent.

The correspondence between Albert and Mileva cannot be used as a direct evidence of her contribution, but Albert is repeatedly addressing the papers in question as "our papers" and referring to "our work".

To make definite conclusions we would have to wait for some additional evidence to appear. For now we can only have our own opinions and preferences about this matter, sometimes based only on our gender or nationality.