rascal has become frightfully lazy,’ Pauline Einstein tells her. ‘I have been waiting in vain for news for these last three days; I will have to give him a thorough talking-to once he’s here.’
Albert tells Marie’s mother that the relationship is over. He won’t be coming to Aarau in springtime.
It would be more than unworthy of me to buy a few days of bliss at the cost of new pain, of which I have already caused too much to the dear child through my fault. It fills me with a peculiar kind of satisfaction that now I myself have to taste some of the pain that I brought upon the dear girl through my thoughtlessness and ignorance of her delicate nature. Strenuous intellectual work and looking at God’s nature are the reconciling, fortifying yet relentlessly strict angels that shall lead me through all of life’s troubles. If only I were able to give some of this to the good child. And yet, what a peculiar way this is to weather the storms of life – in many a lucid moment I appear to myself as an ostrich who buries his head in the desert sand so as not to perceive the danger.
Marie suffers an acute depression, whereas Albert’s eyes focus on someone else.
HERE IS MILEVA
Five male students join the mathematics and physics class, and one woman, Mileva Maric, a twenty-year-old, slim Hungarian-Serb. Albert admires her seriousness. She seems almost as much of an outsider as he does. He notices the orthopaedic boots she wears. One leg is shorter than the other causing her to limp. He admires the lack of fuss with which she deals with her disability.
Mileva becomes friends with another student, Hélène Slavic from Vienna. Hélène is studying history. They have rooms with two Serb and two Croat women in a pension run by Fraulein Engelbrecht at Plattenstrasse 50, not far from Albert.
In one or other of the many cafés on Zürich’s Baschligplatz, he holds forth to his friend Marcel Grossmann, from an old aristocratic Thalwil family.
Albert puffs at his long pipe: ‘Listen to me. Atoms and mechanics are the concepts that will reduce natural phenomena to fundamental principles in the way geometry could be found in a few axioms or propositions.’
They rail against the pointless lives of the bourgeoisie, swearing never to be trapped by the petty and the provincial.
The friends consume vast amounts of coffee, bratwurst and tobacco; so much that they stain Albert’s teeth brown. In the evenings he plays the violin for his friends. The Mozart Violin Sonata in E minor, and Sonata No. 6, K.301. Afterwards they use the telescope at the Eidgenössische Sternwarte, built by Gottfried Semper to look at the night sky. No sign of Mileva.
He pontificates in the physics labs in the hope that Mileva might be impressed. She stares at him and usually directs her stare sharply back to the task in hand. Work comes first. Albert recognises a fellow traveller. He glimpses her in the library and admires her wide and sensuous mouth. He catches sight of her with friends at a concert given by Theodor Billroth performing Brahms. Albert finds the very sight of her radiates powerful sensuality. Perhaps fearful of rejection, he is a passive suitor, waiting for her to make the first move, which she doesn’t.
HEINRICH FRIEDRICH WEBER
At the same time Albert makes enemies. He bridles at the head of the physics department, Professor Heinrich Friedrich Weber, who’s inordinately proud of the new building he’s persuaded Siemens to build. Weber’s predeliction is for the history of physics. Albert’s passion is for the present and future of physics. Weber even makes no mention of Albert’s hero, the mathematical physicist James Clerk Maxwell, whose pioneering equations accurately described the theory of electromagnetism.
Albert treats Weber with a cheeky informality, calling him ‘Herr Weber’, not ‘Professor’. Weber forms a simmering dislike for Albert’s cheek.
Albert is no slouch. Among other courses, he takes Weber’s in Physics, Oscillations, Electromechanics, Theory of Alternating Current and Absolute Electrical Measurements.
Albert also studies alone. He’s captivated by the series of brilliant experiments by Heinrich Hertz, who has discovered radio waves and established that James Clerk Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism is correct. Hertz has also discovered the photoelectric effect, providing one of the initial clues to the quantum world’s existence.
Weber takes him to one side. ‘You’re a very clever boy, Einstein.’
‘Thank you, Herr Weber.’
‘Professor Weber. But you have one great fault. You’ll never let yourself be told anything.’
Albert treats it as a compliment.
Then he causes offence to the other ETH professor, Jean Pernet, by playing truant from his course: Physical Experiments for Beginners. The small, plump Pernet demands Albert receive a Verweis: a strong official reprimand from the director.
Pernet calls Albert to his office. ‘Your work has a measure of goodwill about it. You’re eager enough. But you have a lack of capability. Why not give up physics. Study medicine, philology or law?’
Albert is silent.
‘Well?’ says Pernet.
‘Because I feel I have a talent,’ says Albert. ‘Why can’t I pursue physics?’
‘Do what you want, Einstein. Do what you want. I am warning you. In your own interests.’
When Albert turns up at Pernet’s next lecture he’s given an instruction paper, which he ceremoniously dumps in the wastepaper basket.
Then he causes a sensation in Pernet’s lab. A woman student struggles to seal a test tube with a cork. Pernet tells her the test tube will disintegrate.
‘The man’s insane,’ Albert tells her. ‘His rage made him faint the other day. Passed clean out in class.’
The test tube explodes. The blast damages Albert’s right hand. He can’t play the violin for several weeks.
Though he likes the mathematics professor, Hermann Minkowski, a thirty-year-old Russian Jew, he even plays truant from his lectures. Minkowski calls Albert ‘a lazy dog’.
MARCEL GROSSMANN
His closest friend, Marcel Grossmann, is from an old Swiss family in Zürich. Albert admires Grossmann. He’s a quick learner. The pair hang out at the Café Metropole by the River Limmat. Marcel tells his parents: ‘One day this Einstein will be a great man.’
Music is a diversion from the inadequacies of the ETH. Bach. Schubert. Mozart. So is sailing alone on Lake Zürich.
Albert joins in the musical evenings at Fraulein Engelbrecht’s pension at Plattenstrasse 50, where he turns up with his violin and physics books. Mileva plays the tamburitza and piano.
Albert also attends meetings of the Swiss branch of the Society for Ethical Culture.
He
