Mileva Einstein

It has been established that Einstein's first wife, Mileva, was denied a degree but actually had better grades than he had in college and she cowrote his scientific papers while they were married.

It is somewhat questionable whether or not Albert Einstein was really an intellectual giant standing head and shoulders above everyone around him. It is much more likely he was twice exceptional and got sole credit for the work of two bright people working together.

That's from the footnote of a piece on my parenting site talking about developmental issues in speech because I mentioned so-called "Einstein Syndrome."

One of the reasons our community property laws say the wife gets half is because historically you really could NOT determine how much each contributed to his career success and financial success. 

And I say that because wives frequently serve as a sounding board for a man who is a public figure to privately hash out issues with someone unlikely to repeat it to anyone else. His wife may be the only person he can really trust and if he succeeds and gets wealthy, then she also gets The Good Life and in most cases will not care that she's not being credited.

Odds are extremely good that Mackenzie Scott has more business acumen than Jeff Bezos and he remained married to her until he was ready to retire as CEO of Amazon because he knew he was incapable of running it without her. Neither of them is likely to say that in public.

I think the way to bet is she's an awful, cutthroat person and Jeff Bezos gradually came to hate her but she was absolutely essential to the success of Amazon, so he simply couldn't divorce her until he was ready to retire. And she likely knew it and intentionally made him steadily more miserable so long as he wasn't ready yet to walk because there were billions at stake.

Which makes me wonder what she's really up to with her infamous "generosity" where she dumps huge amounts of money on charities with no warning and in some cases it's extremely destructive to them, like a torrential rain and biblical floods in a desert that has no hope of absorbing that much water at one time.

In the case of Einstein, it genuinely looks to me like it went a lot further than usual and was a lot more than her helping him sort his thoughts. It's likely she really should have been named along with him on the Nobel Prize -- or perhaps instead of him -- and they both knew it, which is why she demanded and got the Nobel Prize money:

In 1919, she agreed to divorce, with a clause stating that if Albert ever received the Nobel Prize, she would get the money.

In my piece about developmental speech issues, I'm saying Einstein had speech delays. I'm not saying that people who talk late following the "Einstein Syndrome" pattern have the mark of genius.

I don't believe he was a genius.

His WIFE probably did more than him. She had better grades than him. People have told humorous and baffling anecdotes for decades about what a terrible and undisciplined student he was and it gets played as "Who understands genius?!" and it gets used to suggest your bright but quirky kid may be a genius instead of the discipline problem you see him as.

Most likely, Albert Einstein wasn't the genius the world believed him to be. Most likely, Mileva Einstein was the heavy hitter scientifically but as a woman in a man's world, she was denied a degree and she chose to stop fighting the system and allowed Albert Einstein to take credit for work that was probably more hers than his. 

And she demanded the Nobel Prize money as hush money for keeping the secret that he's not really that bright. Nobel Prize money plus divorce plus not being the one named for the prize allowed her to buy a couple of apartments and live quietly and support herself independently without a man.

In 1925, Albert wrote in his will that the Nobel Prize money was his sons’ inheritance. Mileva strongly objected, stating the money was hers and considered revealing her contributions to his work.

Albert sent her a letter saying:

You made me laugh when you started threatening me with your recollections. Have you ever considered, even just for a second, that nobody would ever pay attention to your says if the man you talked about had not accomplished something important. When someone is completely insignificant, there is nothing else to say to this person but to remain modest and silent. This is what I advise you to do.

He was credited with the accomplishment and perhaps he convinced himself it really was his work. Or perhaps he was trying to establish written record asserting his claim.

I do not believe I have ever heard that Einstein dazzled people with his brilliance in person. I have always heard more like "Ha ha, funny, the biggest genius of the modern world was no one you would have ever guessed was THAT smart!"

It's always framed like he worked alone and then wrote it down. But if he's that brilliant, you would think there would be anecdotes about him casually expressing insights that had people scrambling to correct something and I don't believe there is.

I've known people who said mind blowing things like "E = mc squared means matter is energy in slow motion." And that's correct though it's kind of woo and probably not something most people want to hear is a valid interpretation of a highly respected scientific theorem. 

And I don't know of any anecdotes about Einstein casually remarking on something like that. You would think if he really was the sole author of relativity or the primary author, he couldn't open his mouth without sometimes saying something like that.

Men tend to get the serious careers. Men tend to get all the credit. 

But my ex husband's military career ended not long after he moved out during our divorce and I know what a spaz he was capable of being. Without someone handling all the other stuff in his life, I don't believe he was capable of bringing his A game to a challenging career consistently.

My ex-husband is almost certainly twice exceptional, like our sons. And like me for that matter.

And I was driven crazy by his claims in arguments that "Someone had to support the family." implying I wasn't that competent when it was crystal clear in my mind that he had a successful career because we both consistently made choices that supported that.

I had better grades than him in school and a higher SAT score. I won a National Merit Scholarship which I turned down in part because of my undiagnosed medical condition and in part because I felt I had a more reliable alternative lined up: 

I had plans to marry a man who wanted a military career and I knew that would adequately support us.

I felt that was a better bet for me than trying to tilt at windmills and be some kind of strident feminist pursuing a serious career in a Wild West setting where we don't really have that hammered out yet.

So I'm absolutely certain a talented wife can make a man's career while no one notices because I was that wife. And I did so under circumstances where it was much much less obvious how much I was the secret sauce for his success, where it's much harder to try to show "I'm the brains of the operation behind his career."