Einstein in Love: a scientific romance by Dennis Overbye

Time was a problem at the end of the 19th century. In the 1890s, Germany still had five different time zones. But fast railway services and telegraphy meant that the world was growing smaller by the day, and, as the new century dawned, there were demands for a universal world time. Ironically, at this moment that the Special Theory of Relativity was born in Switzerland, the country that gave the world the cuckoo clock. Suddenly there was no Newtonian Father Time regulating the hours of the universe. Space and time were, after all, relative.

The year that Albert Einstein threw a spanner into the precision clockwork of Newton's cosmos was 1905. In his annus mirabilis, he published no fewer than four strikingly original scientific papers. Ever since, physics has been little more than a series of footnotes to the theories of a 26-year-old patent-office clerk. But Dennis Overbye's fascinating study of Einstein in Love shows that the physicist's insight into the laws of the cosmos was not matched by his understanding of the human heart.

Overbye gives us a wonderfully picaresque account of the young Einstein: a curly-haired, dark-eyed "student vagabond", flattering the girls and wooing them with his violin. One professor at Zurich Polytechnic even described him as a "lazy dog". At Zurich, Einstein met the gifted Serbian mathematician Mileva Maric. Well-travelled though he was, Einstein had never encountered "anything as exotic as a woman physicist". The 21-year-old Mileva was "beautiful, in an intense, brooding way".

By the end of their studies the two were inseparable, enjoying "midnight excursions to the frontiers of physics". A lifelong opponent of bourgeois conventions, Einstein told his lover: "We shall remain students as long as we live and we shall not give a shit about the world."

But in 1901, Mileva became pregnant, and Einstein reacted (as he put it) like an ostrich, burying his head in the sand. Back in Serbia, Mileva gave birth to a girl, Lieserl, whom Einstein never saw. He married Mileva in 1903, from a "feeling of duty". No one knows quite what happened to Einstein's daughter. This, then, is the touchingly human background to the impersonal science of relativity.

By 1914 the startling originality of Einstein's ideas had been recognised. But Albert and Mileva's ardour had cooled and he began an affair with his cousin, Elsa. She pressed him to divorce Mileva, but he replied cruelly: "I treat my wife like an employee whom I cannot fire." Einstein drew up a bizarre contract which Mileva had to sign to continue living with him: she must do his laundry, serve him three meals a day, never touch his desk, and forgo all personal relations with him. Remarkably Mileva agreed, but the relationship was doomed.

Whilst waiting for the divorce Einstein had an affair with Elsa's 20-year-old daughter. At the same time, he was grappling with gravity. The result was his General Theory of Relativity, the final nail in the coffin of the old Newtonian certainties. As at other stages in his life, physics was an escape route from emotional turmoil. Science, Einstein said, "lifts me impersonally...from the vale of tears into peaceful spheres."

Overbye writes with great sensitivity about the man behind the physics. We see someone who could be "like a child" in affairs of the heart and whose trademark "thought experiments" were often child-like in their simplicity.

But Einstein in Love is far more than a biography of the physicist's early years. Overbye allows us to experience the evolution of great science, revealing the euphoria of that Eureka! moment as well as the personal price paid by scientists and their loved ones.

Peter D Smith's book 'Metaphor and Materiality: German literature and the world-view of science 1780-1955' was published last year

Interesting? Click here to explore further