about what happened with Lieserl. Scarlet fever often leaves some lasting trace behind. If only everything passes well. How is Lieserl registered? We must take great care, lest difficulties arise for the child in the future.”92
Whatever the motivation Einstein may have had for asking the question, neither Lieserl’s registration documents nor any other paper trace of her existence is known to have survived. Various researchers, Serbian and American, including Robert Schulmann of the Einstein Papers Project and Michele Zackheim, who wrote a book about searching for Lieserl, have fruitlessly scoured churches, registries, synagogues, and cemeteries.
All evidence about Einstein’s daughter was carefully erased. Almost every one of the letters between Einstein and Mari
in the summer and fall of 1902, many of which presumably dealt with Lieserl, were destroyed. Those between Mari and her friend Helene Savi during that period were intentionally burned by Savi’s family. For the rest of their lives, even after they divorced, Einstein and his wife did all they could, with surprising success, to cover up not only the fate of their first child but her very existence.
One of the few facts that have escaped this black hole of history is that Lieserl was still alive in September 1903. Einstein’s expression of worry, in his letter to Mari that month, about potential difficulties “for the child in the future,” makes this clear. The letter also indicates that she had been given up for adoption by then, because in it Einstein spoke of the desirability of having a “replacement” child.
There are two plausible explanations about the fate of Lieserl. The first is that she survived her bout of scarlet fever and was raised by an adoptive family. On a couple of occasions later in his life, when women came forward claiming (falsely, it turned out) to be illegitimate children of his, Einstein did not dismiss the possibility out of hand, although given the number of affairs he had, this is no indication that he thought they might be Lieserl.
One possibility, favored by Schulmann, is that Mari’s friend Helene Savi adopted Lieserl. She did in fact raise a daughter Zorka, who was blind from early childhood (perhaps a result of scarlet fever), was never married, and was shielded by her nephew from people who sought to interview her. Zorka died in the 1990s.
The nephew who protected Zorka, Milan Popovi, rejects this possibility. In a book he wrote on the friendship and correspondence between Mari and his grandmother Helene Savi, In Albert’s Shadow, Popovi asserted, “A theory has been advanced that my grandmother adopted Lieserl, but an examination of my family’s history renders this groundless.” He did not, however, produce any documentary evidence, such as his aunt’s birth certificate, to back up this contention. His mother burned most of Helene Savi’s letters, including any that had dealt with Lieserl. Popovi’s own theory, based partly on the family stories recalled by a Serbian writer named Mira Ale
kovi, is that Lieserl died of scarlet fever in September 1903, after Einstein’s letter of that month. Michele Zackheim, in her book describing her hunt for Lieserl, comes to a similar conclusion.93
Whatever happened added to Mari’s gloom. Shortly after Einstein died, a writer named Peter Michelmore, who knew nothing of Lieserl, published a book that was based in part on conversations with Einstein’s son Hans Albert Einstein. Referring to the year right after their marriage, Michelmore noted, “Something had happened between the two, but Mileva would say only that it was ‘intensely personal.’ Whatever it was, she brooded about it, and Albert seemed to be in some ways responsible. Friends encouraged Mileva to talk about her problem and get it out in the open. She insisted that it was too personal and kept it a secret all her life—a vital detail in the story of Albert Einstein that still remains shrouded in mystery.”94
The illness that Mari complained about in her postcard from Budapest was likely because she was pregnant again. When she found out that indeed she was, she worried that this would anger her husband. But Einstein expressed happiness on hearing the news that there would soon be a replacement for their daughter. “I’m not the least bit angry that poor Dollie is hatching a new chick,” he wrote. “In fact, I’m happy about it and had already given some thought to whether I shouldn’t see to it that you get a new Lieserl. After all, you shouldn’t be denied that which is the right of all women.”95
Hans Albert Einstein was born on May 14, 1904. The new child lifted Mari’s spirits and restored some joy to her marriage, or so at least she told her friend Helene Savi: “Hop over to Bern so I can see you again and I can show you my dear little sweetheart, who is also named Albert. I cannot tell you how much joy he gives me when he laughs so cheerfully on waking up or when he kicks his legs while taking a bath.”
Einstein was “behaving with fatherly dignity,” Mari noted, and he spent time making little toys for his baby son, such as a cable car he constructed from matchboxes and string. “That was one of the nicest toys I had at the time and it worked,” Hans Albert could still recall when he was an adult. “Out of little string and matchboxes and so on, he could make the most beautiful things.”96
Milos Mari was so overjoyed with the birth of a grandson that he came to visit and offered a sizable dowry, reported in family lore (likely with some exaggeration) to be 100,000 Swiss francs. But Einstein declined it, saying he had not married his daughter for money, Milos Mari later recounted with tears in his eyes. In fact, Einstein was beginning to do well enough on his own. After more than a year at the patent office, he had been taken off probationary status.97
CHAPTER FIVE
THE MIRACLE YEAR: Quanta and Molecules, 1905
At the Patent Office, 1905
Turn of the Century
“There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now,” the revered Lord Kelvin reportedly told the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1900. “All that remains is more and more precise measurement.”1 He was wrong.
The foundations of classical physics had been laid by Isaac Newton (1642–1727) in the late seventeenth century. Building on the discoveries of Galileo and others, he developed laws that described a very comprehensible mechanical universe: a falling apple and an orbiting moon were governed by the same rules of gravity, mass, force, and motion. Causes produced effects, forces acted upon objects, and in theory everything could be explained, determined, and predicted. As the mathematician and astronomer Laplace exulted about Newton’s universe, “An intelligence knowing all the forces acting in nature at a given instant, as well as the momentary positions of all things in the universe, would be able to comprehend in one single formula the motions of the largest bodies as well as the lightest atoms in the world; to him nothing would be uncertain, the future as well as the past would be present to his eyes.”2
Einstein admired this strict causality, calling it “the profoundest characteristic of Newton’s teaching.”3 He wryly summarized the history of physics: “In the beginning (if there was such a thing) God created Newton’s laws of motion together with the necessary masses and forces.” What especially impressed Einstein were “the achievements of mechanics in areas that apparently had nothing to do with mechanics,” such as the kinetic theory he had been exploring, which explained the behavior of gases as being caused by the actions of billions of molecules bumping around.4
