and 
computer software.('tm' - thoughtmark or thoughtfulmark.)
...we have attempted to describe how the concepts space, time and event can be put psychologically into relation with experience...to serve the purpose of bringing experiences into relation with each other, so that in this way, they can be better surveyed...
- Albert Einstein, from Relativity
and computer software. and
Software
and SoftwareThroughout our history, humanity has sensed with rightful awe, religious spirit and gratitude, and curiosity and mystery, its connection to earth and sky, to Cosmos and Creation. On August 11, 1999, the last total solar eclipse of the 20th century will be visible from the North Atlantic, throughout central and easter Europe including northern Yugoslavia, into Turkey, the Middle East, and the area of Pakistan and India. A much larger surrounding area will also observe spectacular near-total partial eclipse; much of the earth will be bathed in the moon's evening-like shadow for some minutes before returning to full daylight, and many millions of people not in the path of the eclipse will nevertheless observe it live on the Internet and television. The path of visability of the eclipse, and its umbra and penumbra is available on the Internet and detailed at http://sunearth/gsfc.nasa.gov/eclipse/OH/OH1999.html#SE1999Aug11T. As we prepare to observe the upcoming total and near-total solar eclipse over eastern Europe and the recently war-torn Yugoslavia, former Yugoslavia and the Balkans, we cannot help but recall that earlier in this century that same area was the scene of the start of a World War that delayed international scientific cooperation to observe solar eclipses. At that time, militarism and nationalism delayed humanity from gaining and sharing the knowledge brought by an eclipse until postwar 1919. Then, international astronomical teams led by Arthur Eddington, a Quaker pacifist and astronomer who had sustained the dream of global scientific cooperation throughout that dark period when his nation was fighting with Einstein's nation, finally observed the famous eclipse (from Brazil and Africa then) that confirmed Albert Einstein's predictions, giving the first confirmation in nature to support the theory of relativity and thereby giving humanity the giant boost to our collective understanding not only of eclipses, but of physics, light itself, and the relationship and process laws applicable at near and far reaches of the universe. And, we also cannot help recalling that 1919, the year of that eclipse, was also the year of Albert Einstein's legal (but as we shall see, neither emotional, cultural or spiritual) divorce from Mileva Maric Einstein. Mileva was one of the world's first woman students of physics. She was a woman who was born in then Austro-Hungarian Vojvodina, now a part of the Republic of Yugoslavia in the Balkans. During the eclipse, the Balkans, too, will be like the face of a woman peeking out from a shadow or veil, to be partially, almost symbolically, covered and then made visible in fuller light, along the eclipse path. Mileva was, at that time, Einstein's beloved wife and the mother of their children. In recent years, she has been the subject of greatly increased interest by men and women who study the history of science, women's studies, human history, anthropology, psychology, and of course, physics.
The year 1919, 80 years ago, was just one year before women obtained voting rights in the United States, and was the year that finalized Albert Einstein's physical separation from the household of his once passionately loved wife and his natural children. Today, June 30th 1999, is the 94th anniversary of submission of the famous E=mc2 paper on relativity to the Annalen der Physik, a paper now thought may have been submitted by Einstein under the name, according to Swiss custom of using the full marital name, "Einstein Maric" (or Marity, in then Austro-Hungarian). In anticipation of the upcoming August eclipse over Mileva Maric Einstein's area of origin in Vojvodina as well as Einstein's birthplace in Ulm, this presentation will attempt to bring the Einstein family together again in our mind's eye, and reconcile and remarry them culturally and spiritually in our collective imaginations, for the sake of both world science, moral faith and human culture. Just as an eclipse makes more visible some of the sustaining relationships of our solar system, so can people's names often make more visible relationships between them and each other, and their larger world community. Coincidentally, the name "Ein Stein" (one rock in German) can be easily inferred to represent our unique, life-inhabited rock, "Earth", while Maric (Marity) sounds almost identical to the English word "Marriage" or "Marital", one of, if not indeed the, most important life-giving and sustaining yet mysterious relationships between human beings, a kind of strong force, if you will. The focus for all people of the twentieth century as we approach the next century and millennium, is to ask ourselves: "When will we form a lasting marriage of our science with the ethics and faithful necessity of peace and good will?" For, whether we live on the path of the eclipse near the North Atlantic, in Europe, the Middle East, in Pakistan and India, or anywhere between or anywhere on earth, we cannot help but be aware that the timing of the upcoming August eclipse is also nearly synchronous with our upcoming global sober remembrances of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Here, we will review and identify new and interdisciplinary aspects of relativity that bear thoughtful inclusion in our collective concepts of our universe, and our success in exploring it, cooperatively, gratefully and in peace.
Though Einstein was born a German, and Maric was born a then Austro- Hungarian Serb, both considered themselves avowed and dedicated non-nationalists. They were internationalists, or, more accurately, world citizens in attitude, with a strong shared yearning for global peace, human rights and merciful justice as well as a concept of universal physics. Both believed in God, with Einstein of Jewish background but developing a more Spinozan, trancendental or Taoist/Buddhist like religious approach to the Cosmos, and Maric born Eastern Orthodox, and later baptizing their sons in that faith perhaps especially in honor of her parents. Neither remained in their country of origin, with Einstein eventually emigrating to the US where he held dual citizenship with both neutral Switzerland and the US, and Maric spending her life in Switzerland. Their relationship during the time they were together in Europe, and its failure during and after the First World War, has profound lessons for every man and woman student of physics and astronomy interested in the exploration of space, for every person striving for global cooperation deeply concerned about peace in the Balkans and throughout the planet, and for all world culture and families. Albert Einstein was one of, if not THE very most famous and influential individual of the 20th century. As we approach the end of the 20th century in which he and his wife Mileva both lived and became the object of interest to millions of people, and as we enjoy and study the last total solar eclipse of the century and before the new millennium, contemplating the current cultural and historic moment and looking toward the future, it is an especially good time to once again observe the relatedness of these individuals to their and our times and culture, to each other, to their families, to their scientific communities, and to all our collectively shared missions of contribution to planetary progress.
Today, study of the history of science, psychohistory and biography includes multi-disciplinary study of the families and communities within which famous scientists lived and worked. Albert Einstein is probably the most studied and written about person in modern history, and now his wife, Mileva, has also been the subject of several recent biographical works, conferences and articles as well. The interest in their relationship continues to increase, especially since the publication of their now famous love letters, released in the 1980's after many years of conflict between efforts toward release by the Einstein's son's family and the privacy/secrecy-oriented secretary and executor of the Einstein estate. The release of the letters came in the mid-1980's, a time period obviously comparatively open in contrast to the sexual coverups and repression of the 1950's when Einstein died, yet a period cooling off from the heated sexual and cultural upheaval of the 1960's. Now, as the century comes to a close and we are more honestly and maturely considering human progress by men and women in all fields of endeavor from physics and math, to information technology to politics to ethics to marriage and parenting, the letters continue to be intensely studied by many, with far greater mainstream interest in women's historical contributions along with men's than was possible at the time these people lived. Einstein-Maric is one preeminently important "field study" and family history, in our daily growing better understanding as participant-observers, of the ever-necessary yet still unfolding blessing of partnership of males and females on this planet, in stewarding not only their own families but the emotional and intellectual progress of the human family as well. Now, with both men and women of all sciences and the humanities studying the Einstein family in depth, the world is willing to recognize Einstein not as a demigod, but a noticeably flawed but ultimately forgivable genius, a truly wonderful person, a relative of all people (as are we all), and very much a man of his own times and community as much as in some ways far ahead of them. We will consider here the importance of his family, especially the wife and family who bore his name during the pinnacle period of his greatest "miracle" of theoretical productivity. This was his family during the 1905-1916 period of the predictions later confirmed by the 1919 eclipse, that brought Albert fame and enormous celebrity in his culture despite his lifelong humility and self-doubts. Another family in which he much later became step and replacement father/husband also bears study and remembrance, but is not our main focus here as we consider his and the Maric-Einstein family's achievements, and where they left off to be continued for good, into the future.
(tm - thoughtfulmark) and (tm - thoughtfulmark)
Software That Depicts Nature AND Nurture in Ongoing RelatednessAs we reach the end of the 20th century, the debate over nature vs. nurture has matured into the more complex discussion of the mutual contribution of nature AND nurture in awesome, perhaps infinite interaction with each other. The matter is extremely complex, because as we all know, in human life, because of our complexity, the genetic recombination event that creates a new human life cannot occur without a social or interpersonal environmental event, (ideally, a deep emotional bond and marriage eventually leading to the union of egg and sperm). In addition, there is great debate as to the role both nature and nurture play in the ongoing physiology and psychology of a person and the interaction among people across the span of their lifetime. Systems thinkers are only beginning to realize the interactive importance of not just currently existing nature and nurture, but the historical effects of nature and nurture of the collective recent and distant past. Indeed, most modern scientists have come to realize that both work together in a fascinating and inextricable co-defining and co-interacting dance. Some characteristics appear to display more or less proximate genetic ("nature") influence and are being investigated, for example, by the Human Genome Project. One behavioral psychoneurologist, Michael Bailey, has offered a bridge to our thinking, Bailey's rule, stating: "Everything is (roughly) fifty percent genetic", leaving the other roughly fifty percent environment ("nurture"). Clearly, both environment and genes are part of a much larger plan of interaction, some which looks random, but some which looks clearly not random, that occurs over time. Bailey's axiom can serve as a rough practical, as well as possibly spiritual, concept to keep in mind as we consider ourselves and our lives as well as those of all human beings, including the Einsteins.
As a fortuitous synchronicity, in the very month (6/19/99) prior to the
publication of this essay, The Lancet published an article
that drew attention to Albert Einstein, a study being led by
a woman neuroscientst, Dr. Sandra F. Witelson of MacMaster University in
Ontario, Canada. With emphasis on studies that focus on the physical brain,
some may quickly and naively wish to jump to a "nature", that is, a
genetically "caused" explanation of Einstein's genius, based on the brain
he was born with. But based on some of the many Einstein and Maric
biographies, as well as the now many publications about the mental and
intellectual functioning and behavior of women and men, and using the
genogram (family tree including interpersonal processes) and ecomap
(community interaction) software and to
interactively time travel through the family process tree and community
interactions and lives of the Einsteins, we can begin to visualize and
better define fascinating "nature WITH nurture" questions and hypotheses.
Using the software, we can better conduct and guide such investigations
into nature and nurture interaction, the interactive "thought experiments"
that Einstein so aptly termed the useful exercise of imagination to ponder
and increase our understanding of possibilities and relationships of events
in time in our universe.
Many popular astronomers, philosophers and science fiction writers have mused about Einstein's theory of relativity, and its implications for our "travel" in space-time, and wished for an ability to imagine history and lives with alternate time lines that the theory imagines, in order to better appreciate actual spacetime and the universe itself. This is what we will attempt to imagine here, but, like Charles Dicken's Spirit of Past, Present and Future, we also call upon our collective interpersonal sensitivity and ethics as well as decades of social and systems science and experience, to ever so slightly better conceptualize the Universal process already and always in our midst in the natural world, including the interpersonal world all around us. Here, we are assisted by the so frequently studied lives of the Maric-Einsteins and their children, to offer hints and clues of interest to scientists as human beings, to science as a more faithful religious and ethical endeavor, and to all people interested in perhaps the most famous earthlings of the 20th century.
This software was developed first in the context of automating and enhancing techniques long used in the work of family systems theory, by anthropologists, psychologists, medical teams, social workers, marriage and family therapists, and clergy. The software enables us to track both genetically linked givens, such as gender and more or less genetic or other personal characteristics deemed of interest (from special talent to introversion or extroversion to disease or illness, and so on), but the software also allows us to integrate such characteristics interactively with the various supportive, stressful and always very rich and complex multidimensional life variables, such as birth order, changing household membership, events and emotional relationships and processes that impact and interact in patterns among people, families and communities over life cycles and over time. The use of software allows us to automate routine recordkeeping tasks, freeing the mind and heart to spend more time with more important concepts and to begin to develop habits of deeper awareness. Software provides an easily accessible and updateable method of storing and displaying large amounts of information in a well-organized, sensible and context sensitive manner, and to further enlighten research and thinking by organizing and depicting information in ways not previously available. Information is entered by typing text, and the software itself performs all necessary pictorial graphics generation automatically, using state-of-the-art computer technology, and allows the user to travel along with the interpersonal process tapestry from the perspective of any point in time; through the past, present, and upcoming and even hypothetical futures, watching the various interplays of process unfold and co-define each other over time. In the software, events, processes and characteristics can be highlighted and even dated (by year, month or day, or even, if the user prefers, even smaller time intervals) using text and/or color which are chosen by the user, and can be displayed on the computer screen or printed to paper.
and are already in use in the US and more than
20 countries, and are of global, ecumenical and universal intent and
orientation. In major universities, in churches and religious centers
of all denominations, in workplaces and clinics, they have been used to
diagram and make possible the better remembrance and appreciation of
Biblical families from Hagar and Ishmael and Sarah and Isaac and
Abraham as their modern descendants reconcile toward peace, to Noah
and his family as their descendants attempt to safeguard human progress as
well as the other species on our planet, families of modern peacemakers and
public figures of interest to historians, families and their counselors
seeking to faciliate better understanding and healing, and families/work
teams related to work culture, creativity and quality. The goal of the
software is to assist loving and responsible human interaction, especially
in complex situations, and to help people better grasp the implications
and consequences of their behaviors over time and over generations.
The software can export and import data to and from database software
for use by researchers, and it can import data gathered by genealogical
researchers, using the GEDCOM standard caringly developed at Family Life
Centers by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, a first
pioneer in the now fast growing ecumenical and universal recognition
and awareness of family history as a spiritual endeavor available
and important for the entire human family. Today all religions and
ethnicities share in honoring the human family tree and its branches
on our planet earth.
and are designed to work with ease, but
also confidentiality and privacy, so that any family and its helpers can
assist any family at its chosen place and time. We don't doubt for a moment
that both the young Albert and Mileva would have liked to explore it if they
were alive today and had a personal computer loaded with this software!
Installed on a personal computer, the software functions as if it were a
movie in which the user(s) become(s) the director(s). But instead of
photos of faces and scenes, we see diagrams that are the standard symbols
used by family anthropologists, geneticists, psychologists and social
workers around the world to represent gender, family and community
relationships, stress and support, and a variety of emotional
relationship processes. The software allows you to fast forward and
backward, and stop action, through lives and generations, in order to
observe patterns, see consequences, review significant moments, and
thereby better generate questions, concerns, strategies for improvement,
healing, redemption and hope, in a spirit of appreciation, respect and
faith that naturally emerges when you closely observe the workings of
any family over many generations. Because of the multidimensional
unfolding which is incorporated in the design of the software, our
presentation here will only offer a few exemplar "snapshots" of how
it works. Indeed, our Einstein-Maric genogram, if you were to try to view
it all once, would encompass over one hundred known people, and many
multiple generations, and of course, is even now still continuing!
(See Illustration 1, Einstein-Maric family genogram) Also, tens of
ecomaps at least, could be generated to allow one to track and hypothesize
about the various important communities of the Einstein-Maric family's
lives, moving from past to present and future, and each ecomap/genogram
interplay, (which can be viewed in the software by using the option that
allows moving directly from one diagram to the other and back again),
would certainly represent only a chapter of the enormous interactive
biography. So, here we will present just a few, to offer an idea of
the interactivity of the software and the kind of thinking it assists
as it allows you to interactively move back and forth from genogram
to ecomaps or vice-versa.
Obviously, for all families, reality is infinitely far more wonderful and complex than any software could ever hope to model, even with the best human user imagination. Even with computers, we believe, our imaginations will be far too limited to even come close to the awesome magnificence of our everyday lives over generations. But our presentation here will suggest the way that the interactivity of the software works can help our humble thought experiments just a bit, by including, from time to time throughout the essay, the suggestions/ instructions about the types of activities which you can use in the software (i.e. "scroll to the brother's family", "click the mouse to Multiprocess Time Travel through X number months or years forward (or back)", "substitute a mutually understanding or close emotional symbol process for a conflicted one, and imagine the change in the subsequent life events in the family's life or those of the next generations", and so on. This software is being used to discuss the Einstein family, because the 20th century's most famous family taught us not only about the physical universe and space, but probably at least as much about the interpersonal universe and our inner, intimate and human lives, with our warts, faults, achievements, promise and potential. Recalling the famous news cartoon drawing of our planet at the time of Albert Einstein's death in 1955 that bore the caption, "Einstein lived here", we have made enough progress to now evolve the caption to read something the young Albert and Mileva Maric Einstein would have both delighted in, if we could bring their spirits forward to this moment. The caption on our earth, observable to any time traveler from space, would read: "Our relatives, Einstein, his wife, their children, their descendants and all the human family live here, and urge a welcome to our peace-learning, health-learning, everlearning global and solar neighborhood, especially as we watch the eclipse". Someday soon we think this software will accompany the first family in space, and in honor of this June 30th anniversary and the upcoming eclipse, complementary copies are being sent to the earth address of the International Space Station, to assist space agencies around the world in assisting astronaut families. Now, back to the Einstein-Maric family:
One of the most noteworthy, human and moving mysteries in the study of the Einsteins as a couple in history, and physics was what led them to disavow the existence of their first child, Elizabeth, called Lieserl, shortly after her birth. (Scroll to the figure of Lieserl on the genogram). As we use the software to Multiprocess Time Travel through Lieserl's conception, birth and life events, we note Albert and Mileva's pride and truly loving delight in their firstborn. Her name, Lieserl, discussed by the couple in their letters well before their daugther's birth, means dedicated to God, oath to God, or God's oath. Yet, despite the couple's love for each other and their daughter, it is now believed that Lieserl was left in Yugoslavia as an infant, and eventually possibly given up for adoption by relatives, or by another family.
One cannot know for sure if she died in childhood, or if she lives today, (she would be in her 90's), either knowing or not even knowing her famous parentage. Is Lieserl alive? Did she marry? Did she survive World War II? Did Lieserl have children? Like her parents, was she or were her offspring mathematically or musically gifted or intellectually and politically active? Indeed, was or is she a genius of some sort? If she, like her parents, became a strong advocate of grass roots democracy and human rights, did she or her offspring march in marches against dictatorship and nationalistic demagogery? And/or, since Einstein and likely both parents considered themselves pacifists, did she inherit tendencies toward similar behavior, and have she or her offspring worn those target symbols to teasingly but powerfully unconsciously remind all watching of the impact of BOTH bullets AND bombs on their targets as well as the minds of those who shoot and drop them?
Today, most people agree that no matter who uses the weapons, humanity must hopefully soon get beyond an unpreventive pattern in which justice and peace are "achieved" by arms and targets only as a last resort. Today, even the military of all nations agree with such an assessment, as more and more gender and racially inclusive organizations than in the past are grasping the unavoidable necessity of working to assist another "army": the army and skills of caretakers and caretaking professions, such as mediation trainers, human rights workers, social workers, teachers, nurses, doctors, female as well as male business leaders, and especially in home and neighborhoods, mothers and fathers. Even the military is evolving a greater emphasis on teaching all its members (both male and female) the importance in the service of prevention, caretaking and understanding for the sake of life success, and family counseling is now as available at most military installations as it is in civilian life. Many wonder if any military conflict would have occurred in the Balkans at all if societal priorities and arrangements had already caught up to our increasing collective insight, and if this "preventive" army of pro-social activity had received the same financing, attention and allied support as the traditional reactive "weapons" priorities of military. In any case, such a preventive army will be increasingly evident on the ground in the Balkans today, and are now part of Lieserl's and her community, which could be diagrammed in ecomaps produced by the software.
If Lieserl had children, did some of them, like Einstein, flee to a neighboring country to avoid their own nation's draft as he did from pre World War I Germany? Was Lieserl or were any of her descendants, thus Einstein's grandchildren or great-grandchildren, the accidental victim of cluster bombs, or have they survived to experience the eclipse with us in peace? The software allows you to hypothesize the existence of future generations and offspring, based on hypotheses you select by observing earlier generations in the family tree genogram and community ecomap.
As a child separated from her parents, did Lieserl suffer from a partial void in her life and lose confidence in her worth as a girl and human being? In an attempt to fill this void, did she drift toward conventionality and even learn to adopt the provincialism, and patriarchy, and nationalism that her parents had rebelled against and themselves tried to reform? Or, was she raised with tolerance and did she inherit from her parents a lack of ethnic prejudice? Were her friends, like those of her parents, independent yet spiritually oriented thinkers of all religions and ethnicities in Vovojina: Orthodox, Muslim, Catholic, Jewish, Protestant, and so on? Sensing the fate of her mother and maternal aunt (who we will discuss in greater depth later), did she become an activist for women's education holding hands with Albanian, Serbian, Hungarian, and women of all ethnicities in groups like Women in Black of Yugoslavia and many other similar indigenous groups? Did Lieserl marry an open-minded husband like her famous father, who was, relatively speaking, supportive of women's minds for his day? True, it is possible that this year, world history may have brought an especially ironic tragic end to the daughter (or descendants) of the century's most famous person via collateral damage from a bomb made in the country of her father's eventual citizenship or via stressful repression by a regime of her mother's country of birth. But happily still, another outcome was possible, so today, still, we must and ought hope or at least imagine in our hearts and imaginations that Lieserl may be remembered as a mythic nonegarian - a courageous and intelligent matriarch, surviving all the mayhem, perhaps with no or perhaps with GREAT private and secret care and knowledge of her adoption and her parental heritage. Some researchers feel they be able to locate Lieserl, based on evidence they have gathered. Are her very children and playmates, boys and girls, miraculously surviving Einstein-Maric grandaughters and grandsons and/or grandchildren of their childhood best friends, now community with us, gazing up in wonder at the heavens of the eclipse, moving toward the upcoming mysterious swath over Europe including Vojvodina, at this place at this time?
Today, the current generations of the world are again focussing on this
place on the planet where Lieserl was left, in fragile
but imaginable hope of not only avoiding a World War, but also establishing
a culture of peace, education, human rights including women's rights, of
truth and reconcilation, brotherhood and sisterhood, of overcoming and
transcendant peace. Watching the eclipse together, under sky or even
via Internet and camera, is part of that focusing. The world community
in its cultural heart during its celebration of this universal event,
will both symbolically adopt this once devalued or forgotten
girl-child, Lieserl, and reconcile her to her world, the memories of her
famous parents and global cultural conscience. Perhaps even the
Judges of the Hague Tribunal, especially because the Chief Judge and
the UN High Commissioner on Human Rights are also women, will remember
the idealism of her parents (Einstein admired the forgiving
Gandhi most of all his contemporaries), who once were refugees of war,
prejudice and atrocities themselves and, like the Tribunal, did not
believe in the death penalty but did believe in the need for democracy,
international law and collective as well as individual responsibilty,
truth and reconciliation, and the possibilities of change on all sides.
Getting back to the software, one may use and
to speculate on and view possible futures for Lieserl, her neighbors and her
descendants using the life events and Time Travel features. In the spirit of
the thought experiment, what is the future you would hypothesize for her;
how would you like her, her children's and her grandchidren's lives to go
now, and why?
Was the fact that Lieserl was not only born out of wedlock, but a female, part of the many factors that led to her semi-abandonment in 1902 (via being placed for adoption or being left with loving relatives) by her famous father and now deservedly better remembered mother, with the assistance of Mileva's proud and patriarchal Serbian family? Why would Albert and Mileva, strongly in love with each other and deeply committed to each other despite enormous obstacles, leave their child, give her up for adoption or a cloistered, hidden life with relatives and never (as far as we know) reclaim or recontact her again? Some possible speculations, as we look at Einstein and Mileva's genogram and ecomap and by scrolling and using the software's Multiprocess Time Travel features are:
1) Were neither Albert or Mileva willing to incur the further wrath of Albert's dominating mother, Pauline Koch Einstein, who, perhaps, had her own ethnic prejudice against Serbs and perhaps against any "outsider", any non-Einstein woman who finally challenged her preeminence in her very close family's life? (We know Pauline's objections were not based on religious prejudice - Einstein's parents were not religious, nor religiously observant, and indeed were far less spiritually oriented and God-seeking than Einstein himself was). Pauline was stubbornly set against Einstein and Mileva's marriage (Illustration 2; view a 1910 simplified "snapshot" of the emotional triangle (the conflict symbol lines between Albert and Pauline Koch Einstein and cut-off relationship symbol between Pauline and Mileva) and Pauline's emotional cut-off of Mileva extended to all of Einstein's children with Mileva. (Today, a "liberated" Pauline would likely have felt quite differently, proud of her educated and pioneering daughter-in-law, and likely supportive and more connected to her grandchildren, as we shall see later as we use the software's interactive time travel features.)
2) After many early years of struggle both professionally and economically to survive at all, did both Albert and Mileva fear that the growing recognition that Albert was finally beginning to achieve in then anti-Semitic and very proper Prussian physics circles would have been destroyed by the "shameful" disclosure that they had a child out of wedlock well prior to their legal marriage?
3) Was Mileva stunned and dejected over her failure to pass physics exams taken while she was pregnant and secretly a young mother? (View Mileva's life events, Illustrations 3a and 3b, and travel through them using Multiprocess Time Travel, especially from 1899-1901; for example, note how the event of the exams occurs just 2 months after her discovery that she was pregnant.) And, fearing to appear to her peer community as a complete failure as both a physicist and "proper" woman, did she surrender to mores of the time, which were extremely unsympathetic to women, who in most countries did not yet have the vote and many basic human rights?
4) Was Mileva afraid to openly shame her parents and especially her father, a proud Serbian patriarchal head of a family, who had spent years and great effort breaking down male-only barriers in education to see to his first-born's advanced schooling in science? (read Milos Maric Sr. life events in the software.)
5) Did Mileva feel the need to leave a baby in her own place, leaving the child with her mother and younger sister Zorka, less educated women clearly having a secondary role in the patriarchal family structure, as compensation for letting her parents' eldest child leave the familiarity of their nest and Yugoslavia for the then far more intellectually open and neutral Switzerland? (Scroll around Maric family constellation; view Zorka's life events).
Biographers now suggest that Mileva tried very hard to find physics jobs for her husband and herself in Yugoslavia's Universities, something that is hard for couples in many areas of work, even science, even today to do, although getting easier, (see http://www.physics.wm.edu/dualcareer.html and http://www.the-scientist.library.upenn.edu/yr1995/oct/split_951030.html), but especially more possible for home-based work and communication because of the Internet. Only after failing to find herself and her husband a community that would help her family find support as both parents and scientists did she leave Lieserl behind, to rejoin Einstein in Switzerland, where they continued as intimates to give a home to the epochal contribution that came while Einstein was an obscure clerk at a patent office in 1905. Still, was the leaving of Lieserl a fateful decision for the entire world?
The decision to leave Lieserl was certainly the single most fateful emotional decision for the Maric Einstein family. It was a decision made in secret, without the assistance of family systems-aware pastoral counseling or family/career counseling available today in modern America and more and more throughout the world, now that family and community systems and therapy techniques are increasingly used worldwide. At the time Albert and Mileva, so ahead of their times, lived, there was little to help a struggling young ethnically diverse and truly talented couple balance the requirements of parenting, the demands of career, their dedication to science, and their own unique personalities and sense of esteem within their families of origin (each had a strong dominant parent figure - Einstein's mother and Mileva's father), and their sense of inclusion within a community. Indeed, the Einsteins made the decision to leave Lieserl well prior to the prominence of even Freud, the first pioneer, (if now understood to be heavily limited by his own gender biases), of talking about one's problems in order to sort them out. As we shall see, the fact that Freud became an object of near worship for one of Einstein and Mileva's other children, Eduard, who likely paid a high price for intuitively sensing his family's weighty family secret and stresses, suggests a cumulative tragedy of living in a culture where mutual dialogue and communication between a couple and within a family was not yet either a defined value or an easily available resource in the community.
Furthermore, it is likely that Einstein's abandonment of his firstborn and daughter played a troubling if unconscious role in Einstein's problems with intimacy throughout his life, his almost compulsive urgent need to later marry his 2nd wife/cousin Elsa (who appears in two places on the genogram showing she was both mother's niece and paternal grandfather's greatniece) as well as Albert's wife, and his adoption of her two fatherless daughters via marriage. In a sense, Einstein knew this marriage was adulterous and even somewhat unnatural according to our thinking today, but both his mother, his colleagues, and his culture accepted it as natural and not worthy of comment for most of the 20th century. There was some great kindness in it too, since this cousin had also lost her first child (to stillbirth) and her other children had been abandoned by or cut-off from their natural father, Max, and had no father until Albert filled that role and undertook that responsibility lovingly. This is reminiscent of family custom among Biblical and other early patriarchal tribal cultures, in cases where the natural father had died or left and widows or divorcees were not seen as men's equals and thus, unable or unfit to remarry outside the family clan or to be able to support themselves and their children. A closer view or print of Einstein's full family genogram (Illustration 1) would immediately show that this pattern was prevalent in early generations of Albert and Elsa's relatives, and reflected itself in Einstein's family's encouragement that he marry his divorced cousin whose maiden name was already Elsa Koch Einstein (because of this pattern in previous generations).
But was it the haunting and unconscious guilt and memory of Lieserl that contributed to Einstein's yearning and ironic ambivalence about close attachments later in life, which may have even taken an increasing toll on his personal happiness, openness, and even his creativity as a scientist in America? In some unconscious way, perhaps it even affected his ability to reconcile relativity theory with quantum theory, and thwarted the genius' search toward the famous elusive Grand Theory of Everything which physicists and mathematicians will continue to discuss as we will gaze upon this upcoming eclipse. (Scientific biographers may wish to use Multiprocess Time Travel to look at Einstein's domestic life, his letters, his avoidance of mention to even fairly close colleagues of the lost child in his life, juxtaposed with "mental blocks" or errors that emerge in his famous scientific correspondence over these years. For dedicated biographers even this material can be entered in as life event information using the software's text fields.)
Also, like a subtle teasing puzzle piece and metaphor about the state our human relativity in early 20th century, another possibility about Lieserl has been the subject of speculation, and may be of particular interest to life in America. On Friday the 13th in April in 1928, when Einstein, by then already in Princeton in the United States, was in need of nursing due to a heart condition as well as in need of a secretary to assist in his now overwhelming correspondence with physicists around the world, his cousin Elsa, (who was now his wife) with the help of Elsa's sister who was involved in helping World War I war orphans, hired a young European woman who was from Europe, and had been a war orphan, to become secretary/nurse for Einstein. Perhaps the job kept this young women in America, instead of another life path in which she would have returned to Europe but died there during World War II, and perhaps her presence as a nurse to a father-figure lengthened his life span considerably. Yet, was something far more complex and a mixed-blessing occurring here?
The woman's name was Helen Dukas, and much later, it was she that for years worked with the first executor of the Einstein papers to diligently prevent Einstein's son from releasing the love letters, including the ones that revealed that Lieserl was born. Because of the sealed secrecy of the papers involved in Lieserl's adoption, it is likely that neither she herself, nor Einstein, nor Elsa, nor Mileva, indeed, that no living person anymore could have known if Dukas herself, as some have speculated, was or may have been Lieserl. The word secretary refers to a person who records the thoughts and works of another, rather than their own thoughts and works, and the secretaries of famous people may also serve as nurses and loyal emotional supports to their employers, as Dukas diligently served Einstein. In a sense, with regard to their work, a secretary is not their own person, but, obediently and indispensably, if uncritically, a server of others as a submissive servant rather than an involved collaborator or potential equal. In America during much of the twentieth century, the job of being a secretary was almost synonymous with a glass ceiling and the lack of expectation of any leadership or coleadership role.
Interestingly, the word secretary derives from the root word, secret. If Lieserl did serve as secretary for the leader of the world's physics community during the twentieth century, with no living person including herself allowed to know the facts of her birth or her true identity, is this a metaphor for a society that, for a time, needed to keep something secret from itself since it was not then ready to develop the full intellectual gifts of its daughters? If, assuming there is anything to this speculation about Lieserl and the adoption papers could have been found and unsealed; if Einstein had known Dukas "was" the daughter of the wife he had once loved so passionately because she was a collaborator and muse about physics, and in particular, if Mileva had known of Dukas' "identity", would the Maric-Einstein family have seen to it that the orphan Dukas became more than a secretary, and received more education of her own, as her step-sisters, Einstein's adopted daughters (Elsa's/Max's daughters) did, as well as far greater worldwide appreciation and recognition during her blind Mercury-like messenger role for the physics community during her life? Many women in America were secretaries during that period. Would the twentieth century have then seen less violence if instead of secretaries merely carrying correpondence, the messengers had also felt freer to be full ethical commenters and contributors as well? Was the physics of the twentieth century stuck at sorcerer's level because its chief messenger was seen as a mere lifelong apprentice? Many books are now being written about the excellence of women in work settings, and a particular and integrative style of women, in comanagerial roles on important tasks and projects. In the twenty-first century, will our genius understanding include clear knowledge of our human community's daughters and what greatness they are capable of when they serve us knowing who they are? Will the females of the twentieth century know and develop their true identities as full coservants and co-creators on our planet, along with males? Whether they live in the Balkans, America, and around the world, will their fathers and mothers work together mutually to assure the full inclusion, legitimacy and development of daughters throughout life, as well as sons? What will their genograms and ecomaps look like?
With regard to her impact on our culture, Lieserl's story is an ultimate
confirmation that "imagination is more important than knowledge".
Is Lieserl alive in Yugoslavia? Was she a secretary in the United States?
Lieserl's actual fate may never be known, and even if it is, it remains
most interesting to use thought (and feeling) experiments, as with our
software, to hypothesize and use our imaginations about her life, and the
impact of the secret and revelation about her, as well as the oath
and dedication to God that this love child's name means on the twentieth
century and the future. For Lieserl, the eclipse allows her a family reunion
with the entire human family and community. As one example, using
, we have entered information for just one of the many possible
ecomaps related to Lieserl. Illustration 4 is a "snapshot" of a possible
interactive ecomap model of today's cultural, scientific, political and
academic community worldwide as we speculate and comment on the significance
of Lieserl in the global consciousness.
Another interesting controversial topic about the Einsteins says as much
that is archetypal about our ideas about the human condition as it says
about the remarkable Einstein-Maric couple. Just how much effect did
Mileva's ideas or computations contribute to the theory of relativity?
The question preoccupies many, (for example, see the History of Science
students' discussion at http://lucknow.com/horus/hs106bd/wwwbd3.html).
The topic was also the subject of a thought-provoking 1990 meeting of
the American Association for the Advancement of Science, that was attended
by John Stachel, Evan Walker Harris, Senta-Troemel Plotz, Lewis Pyenson,
Carol Herzenberg, and others; and on the Internet, one can find the work
of Margarete Maurer, who along with Highfield and Carter, has also noted
Trbuhovic-Gjuric, Dord Kristic and a growing list of authors and
commentators who have given the question consideration from various points
of view. Was Mileva simply a reasonably well-informed advanced student of
physics who nevertheless contributed few important ideas but was a convenient
as well as intimate sounding board? Was she the indispensable mathematician
who painstaking if mundanely checked Einstein's math, and insured that
Einstein's theoretical spatial imagination received enough complete math
equations as underpinning in order to progress? Was she important primarily
as a sympathetic, romantic muse, a fellow breaker of traditions that,
because of the unique and then so very rare combination of female and
physicist, indispensably stimulated Einstein's genius on many levels,
as woman, friend, lover and a fellow spirit in the rarified atmosphere
and uncanny world of physics? Just how much of relativity was a product
of her knowledge or intuition? Using the ecomaps, a scholar
could diagram the physics communities of Einstein and his wife, those of
physicists and biographers who studied Einstein up until 1985, and those
of today, where far more women, men who have women colleagues, and
husband-wife scientific teams are present, as they have attempted to
address Mileva's contribution.
Interestingly, History of Science Professor Dr. Ronald Tobey sadly worried that some of his very young and often still single college students in the sciences (http://www.lucknow.com/horus/hs106bd/wwwbd3.html) resist the idea of a collaboration between Einstein and his wife. According to Tobey, some contemporary women as well as men prefer to think one OR the other was REALLY the main catalyst of the intuitions behind the theory, rather than conceive of an interaction or collaboration. But one would not be surprised to find another reaction among many young lovers and young marrieds among Tobey's students, and mutually inspiring husband-wife collaborators in any field. Certainly, many mature artists and creative entrepreneurs today, men and women, would find it difficult not to acknowledge that interpersonal, interactive factors in love and shared thoughts of creativity among very close friends and lovers may be a key to some of the world's creative work, its ethical and responsible stewardship and sustenance, and indeed, much of human general progress. Many find it hard to believe this did not occur to a significant extent in the Einstein-Maric relationship, at least with regard to motivation and felt inspiration, if not to perhaps a few of the key cognitive ideas and revolutionary mindsets themselves. But it is clear, too, that during this period, Mileva especially had much more to think and feel about related to Lieserl and her next child, Hans Albert, and digest very personally and emotionally a relativity that was not at all theoretical, involving her own identity and life cyle adjustment, that must have been quite complex.
Genograms and ecomaps represent gender by using squares to represent males, and circles to represent females. By doing so, the software begins to allow us a look at the complex complementarity of activities of the sexes, indeed, all people on a family tree in relation to each other and their communities, that begins to emerge more clearly when one can observe them over many generations. The software can also track various characteristics of interest, using text as well as shading or colors to fill the squares and circles. Within any genogram and ecomap it is possible to speculate on gender as well as other unique charteristics of individuals, and patterns that show up in families that occur as a matter of nature, nurture, and most likely, both nature and nurture, in very complex ways.
Dr. Witleson's recent publication in Lancet has emphasized unique features of Albert Einstein's brain that may focus attention related to current hypotheses about brain structure, function and development, and thus, about nature and nurture when it comes to creativity and genius. Today, modern techniques are already beginning to allow us to non-obtrusively scan the living brain of volunteers and patients in such a way that section and dissection are rendered obsolete. But, even with (and even without) further techniques involving sectioning a deceased's actual brain, (let alone cutting Einstein's brain, which to some is almost like the cutting up of holy and spiritual relicaries), studies of various types have already revealed much, and many things are well known about animal, human and thus, Einstein's basic brain physiology.
For example, Einstein's large head noticable at birth, his language delay, his gender, with the influence of male testosterone on his motivational and increased spatial fascination development during gestation and continuing - all these are consistent with and fit the general picture of spatial and mathematical ability which has already been widely reported in behavioral neuropsychology ranging from studies in animal behavior to brain autopsy to CAT, MRI and PET scans of structure, function and behavioral studies and population studies in children and adults. Even Einstein's deep, sometimes emphatic voice, especially under pressure or when in a rebellious moment, are more like those typical of males, and may have also contributed to his strict Prussian professors' initial disapproval of this rebel. The striking finding of Dr. Witelson that Einstein's parietal lobe was not divided by the sylvan fissure as are almost all other human brains, male or female, and her hypothesis that this unusual difference aided his spatial imagination by making more synapses in this area of the brain more possible certainly does suggest a very strong genetic component of a specific area of genius. But even here, because the autopsy can give us only a retrospective, we cannot help but wonder that the growth and plasticity of a brain in relation to environment did not also play a very significant role in building Einstein's synapses and filling in where a fissure would usually be, or even further eliminating a less than average fissure that may itself have been a genetic endowment present at birth.
Certainly, Einstein's brain and its growth would have been stimulated and nourished by the emotional/cognitive impact of myriad small and large, and sometimes cherished nodal life events and incidents especially in childhood. Such events as the intensely remembered familial modeling of his father and uncle's work in the field of electricity and electromagnetism, including Einstein's famous autobiographical memory of the "holy compass" given to him during a childhood illness by his easy going and accepting father, "the holy geometry book" which he began to develop theories about even as a boy which he shared with a very close paternal uncle, the extreme interest in music shared with his mother, a strong figure who was an excellent pianist (yes, it is likely Einstein heard Mozart and other music while in the womb, and throughout his childhood!) and his eventual frequent expression via the violin, all stimulated intellectual growth as well as interest in order and harmony that were the hallmarks of Einstein's science as well as his dedication to sharing knowledge and ethical humanity on the larger social issues of his life. Looking at his early life events on the genogram and ecomap (See Illustration 5, Einstein's early ecomap, and Illustrations 6a and 6b, Einstein's life events from the genogram software, with a "snapshot" of his figure during one period of special creativity), one can begin to imagine how early events and relationships continued to reverberate throughout his life, and nature and nurture complemented and intensified Einstein's talents in remarkable interaction, leaving their record not only in his brain, but his heart, mind and life.
But what of Mileva's mind and, indeed, her brain? Was she, as some studies have suggested about girls and women who are unusually more like talented males in the development of her own spatial and mathematical ability, partly a product of the brain she was born with? Were her math and physics interests thoroughly predetermined in a slightly hormonally unique firstborn's gestation in her mother's womb? Or was her choice of physics as a student also a fulfillment of a self-educated, intellectually upwardly mobile patriarchally oriented parents' dreams, perhaps especially a determined father (Milos Sr.) who had hoped his first-born would break social barriers against race and ethnicity? Was there a special father-daughter interaction and influence, even a paternal pressure or will, that the firstborn Mileva should endeavor in disciplines and directions more father-driven and typically male, that is, math and science? (See Illustration 7, Mileva's childhood and youth ecomap.)
Perhaps this was especially true in a family where Mileva's mother Marija was comparatively less educated than the father, was not a professional or worker outside the home as well as in, and was probably expected to hold a deferrent and submissive relation to the father throughout Mileva's childhood and throughout her life. And, when Einstein's own emotional rebellion and conflicts with his mother began to resurface disguised as flirtation and especially within-family (cousin) adultery, how did his sometimes controlling, aggressive and demeaning and loud response to Mileva's criticisms, worries and suspicions affect her self-esteem and value of her own intellect? (Scroll around the genogram to observe patterns of dominance and withdrawal in all the families.) In some ways, perhaps Einstein had married a person less dominant but more supportive in a marital emotional relationship; a person more like Einstein's father, Hermann, and Maric's mother, Marija. And, perhaps at some important moment, did Maric's parents begin to subtly communicate to her that it was enough for her to be married to a great physicist; once she was married, did their keen support for their own daughter's mathematical and scientific talent lessen in comparison to their emphasis that now she concentrate on the care and feeding of the post-1919 now increasingly monumentally famous son-in-law and his sons? Certainly, with rare exception, the culture in general was not used to or prepared for two known stars shooting from the same family, one male and one female, and indeed, as middle class parents, Mileva and Einstein had neither the community cultural support or financial ease to undertake such a lifestyle while raising two boys. In any case, at some point or points in her life, Maric stopped taking herself seriously as a student of physics for many reasons, and began to feel the greater necessity of maternal caretaking, and as time went on, this became almost a forced choice, with her caring for her children exclusively. (She even demurred from socializing with Marie Curie when the opportunity presented itself.) Was there a moment, after the divorce and realizing she could no longer also return to her own physics career or participate as an involved partner to her husband's scientific progress as well, when she suffered a mental and physical collapse? Did she then rouse herself from the collapse, via the custodial parent's intensity to care for, love and even overprotect the children her husband had also now physically left? We can see the timing of these events as we travel back in time, and, using the software to show other events that we think would have been more encouraging to Mileva, we can imagine different outcomes for her, her children, and Albert himself if, in later life, Mileva had returned to a more public life and overt intellectual contributions to science, and Albert had been as involved as Mileva in nurturing their sons, and especially his youngest son, Eduard.
Some of Maric's early statements and subsequent developments in the Maric family suggest that Maric may also have had considerable talent in the areas of psychology, healing and medicine. Were these talents also family genetic and inborn talents in that they are talents which may be of some greater more typical intellectual interest to bright females as well as males? Were these talents left undervalued and less rewarded in a daddy's first-born, but later able to flower better in a more relaxed third sibling, a brother? (Maric's youngest sibling, Milos, became a talented doctor, a field which in the West, was then, too, largely closed to most women with some occasional exceptions.) Again, in Maric's case, her mix of talents were likely an interaction of nature and nurture. But because the notion of female intelligence was so unheard of to so many in her time, the pattern of their actual expression and fulfillment was more complex, and to many, it seems as if it was blocked by both the larger culture and her family context. The sense of her situation seems even more poignant. If she had had more support and had been encouraged to return to science, perhaps she would have especially excelled and contributed in an integrative field, ie. biophysics or medical physics of the kind that will one day eventually heal the neural synapse disease suffered by Stephen Hawking? Or would she have pursued history of science and interpersonal ethics in the science community? Her triumphs and difficulties in expressing them in young adulthood and in later life may also indeed say much about the culture of the time and its collective inability to nurture unique, integrative or hybrid intellectual talents in an adult female, a discussion to which we will return later. In the case of Maric and her times, cultural nurture did not substantially occur; a highly intelligent woman was left to and nudged by events, to "give up" on her own talent.
Still, the unique genius and promise of this wonderful family stands out. While male-to-male intellectual collaborations were common in their day, and female-to-female cooperation was also highly common in their culture (in raising children), was there a promise beckoning in the husband-wife Maric-Einstein interaction that literally gave a focussed, visionary home to and resulted in the "miracle" period of development of the Relativity of physics, equal to if not even greater than the then oh-so rare collaboration of the Curies? By Einstein's own words to Mileva about "our relativity", the theory was certainly somewhat experienced as a natural collaboration, born of their love and intellectual friendship as man and woman, strengthened by intense motivators of their attraction for each other literally, their sexual and gender-opposite companionship and attraction, and perhaps the pride and joy of being young parents. In their way, their collaboration resulted in a meteoric moment that began to light the sky for the twentieth century as it wondered at the universe. They were ahead of their time, and their emotional creative relationship was not sustained. But what could have resulted if their collaboration had lasted well past the eclipse of 1919?
While our understanding is still far too limited, especially because individual differences between individual women compared to other women and men compared to other men most often outstrip differences based on gender, recent studies have tended to show that while male brains are bigger than females, there may be significant differences in the lateralization of men's and women's brains; that is, the tasks of the left (verbal, logical) and right (spatial, intuitive) brain are more divided in men's brains, while in women's brains, the brain is organized with more integrated balance, more wholistically, with tasks of right and left brain occurring in both hemispheres of the brain simultaneoulsy more often. It has also been shown that women's cortical brains are far more developed in the area of interpersonal intelligence, including touch and sight (facial expression) accuracy and sensitivity. Some studies have shown that from the first days of life into adulthood, females are more interested in and eventually more accurate in identifying motive and emotion when they look at a human face and gaze into human eyes, and are more able to intuit or predict human patterns of behavior based on the processing of many interpersonal inputs from their senses and memories. Of course, both men and women are good at all these tasks, and their brains are far more similar than dissimilar; these are differences of degree and not opposite poles totally distinct from each other. Both sexes can be clearly blessed with math and science intelligence as well as what Salovey and Goleman have called emotional intelligence; and some researchers now feel there are at least 7 major "types" of intelligence that human beings may have in various degrees and combinations; what we are interested in here is especially their complementarity, creative interdisciplinary hybridization, balance, integration, and interaction within couples, families and all people in general, as we track not only the squares and circles that represent these individuals on our genogram, but also the many factors around them. Is it possible that in more primitive times, polarization of the sexes may have actually assisted their ability to perform labor intensive complementary functions? But in our more technological times, from the twentieth century and now as we approach the twenty-first, perhaps overlap and mutual integration while maintaining important differences may be the hallmarks of a complementarity that produces the highest intellectual functioning for both sexes.
Some studies have suggested that to date, while men's brains are larger, women's may run more efficiently with regard to blood flow and other factors; Crudely put, thus, while more men may find it easier to know "more", more women may find it easier to know "better" about what they know; and while more men may understand and reason about spatial patterns better, more women may understand and reason about human and "meta" patterns better, and may be more adept at identifying in the search for knowledge a sense of emotional focus, beauty, human significance, happiness, spirituality and an almost poetic musical or literary adventure. It is not unlikely that Mileva was able to do such muse-like tasks even better than some of Einstein's more knowledgeable male physicist friends and colleagues (also on our larger genogram as "externals" to the family) who nevertheless also contributed to Einstein's interpersonal support system and work (with the exception of kind Besso, who seems to have been very creative but at times also overwhelmed by attempting to balance dual talents). As some of Einstein's more personal letters to Mileva make clear, some men become too depressed to think at their best without the love, companionship and shared interest of a supportive, listening and involved partner/colleague, especially of the opposite sex. But, there is every reason to think this is equally true of women on the mental tasks that preoccupy them, often interpersonal ones. Surely, the social taboos about mourning the lost baby with an intellectually challenging husband whose mother already did not like her may have had even greater impact on Mileva's spirits and self-esteem than it did even on Albert's as they interacted with each other, with other family members and indeed with colleauges and friends who were the fellow young physicists, thinkers and, too, young parents of their day, including Besso, Grossman, and others.
And perhaps very importantly, size and/or shape differences in the corpus callosum and other structures that serve to allow communication between right and left hemispheres of the brain have been discovered between men and women; many studies have shown this area to be larger and more bulbous in women. Furthermore, it is now realized that cell development in the corpus callosum as well as other brain sturctures are indeed influenced by task involvement and function, including intellectual involvement and interpersonal relationships. Is is possible that during the time of the intuitive development of special relativity and his closeness with his wife, Einstein's corpus callosum was more developed than later in his life when he no longer lived and corresponded intimately with a female companion who was also talented in science and math, and with whom he was sharing simultaneously detailed letters observing his family dynamics even as he included comments about physics and the theory of light? Did this increased communication between his hemispheres, in the context of the love of an intellectually capable female helping him to stand up to his beloved but powerful mother, spur his period of greatest genius? And, would a less interfering, more strongly receptive family (in-law) and community culture have done the same for Mileva? Could she then have produced more in the area of medical physics or the ethics of physics, had her husband and family recognized more clearly her interests?
If her forte had become, (with other women physicists who have more often been hands on child-raisers), cooperation to assure ethical interpersonal behavior in science and the application of science; had she been more or a co-leader in focussed attention to leading advancement in the status of women in science, could Mileva have spearheaded a reduction in the Cold War arms race? Could she have curtailed the century's tendency to compete to amass and proliferate nuclear weapons that became the hallmark of the period--indeed a sitution that, without the added assistance of his wife and many other colleagial physicist-wives, Albert and his closest colleagues, like Szilard, could only warn against but not prevent? If the couple had received counseling and the marriage saved, would Mileva's intellectual peak and greatest contributions come simultaneously with, or continued later along with her husband's, and profoundly helped our world during the times in which she lived? Instead of only Einstein writing to warn Roosevelt of the dangers of the atomic bomb, would the Einstein-Maric couple instead have written to both Eleanor and Franklin together? How would life cycle events, including childbirth and the shared balance of parenting children early on, have made a difference in Mileva's contribution? What if she had lived in a culture prepared to be as receptive of women's intellectual gifts as men's; perhaps a society that offerred financially supported parental leave to working parents? (In light of this thought, will modern Swiss rethink an unexpected defeat of a recent referendum on the issue of paid parental leave?) What if while in Berne, Einstein had not just had one miracle year, but he and his wife had had enough parental leave around the births of all their children to assure that there had been many such miracle years? The broker of peace in the Balkans, Ahtisaari, is from a country (Finland) where gender balance supporting men and women in caring for children as well as other activities is culturally supported and legislated. Are their any such couples today that are reexperiencing the same issues in their lives? In any case, scroll around the genogram and ecomap, go from one to the other and back again, as you imagine and add various life paths that could have occurred for Mileva and her times, and look at those that did.
And, again, indeed, thinking in brain terms, what of the involvement of their (Mileva's and Albert's) limbic systems - the emotional systems of the brain? In layperson's terms, what of their hearts, that experience of happiness and motivation? How did it effect their work, and impact as mates and parents, both on each other and within themselves? It is likely that Mileva's emotions peaked and valleyed repeatedly during this complex period; but that their mutual emotional support generally gave both these remarkable rebels and pioneers extremely important emotional satisfaction that sustained them as a couple. It helped them transcend, at least for a time, the disapproval of Albert's mother, the death and tragic loss of Albert's father who on his deathbed finally gave his much needed approval to his son to marry his dedicated sweetheart. It evem helped them transcend the economic tribulations and eventual horror of a Europe and especially nationalistic Vaterland contaminated with nationalistic provincialism planting the seeds of even greater human misery, even specifially planting them against Einstein himself. It is likely that in retrospect, the genogram and ecomap generated by the software, along with the detail provided by the letters, notes and correspondence of the Einstein papers now so carefully assembled, will certainly provide many researchers with additional and deepened insights and guided hypotheses into whatever neurophysiologists and psychologists as well as historians wish to speculate on about this famous pair. And whether using brain samples, or more likely, when utilizing non-invasive behavioral and natural studies of current male and female students of science and other creative people who also show high social interest and emotional intelligence in many fields, interactive nature and nurture study will tell us more and more about human beings and the possibilities of their interaction in love and active and receptive partnership.
Related to emotions and motivation, we must also not neglect the hormones and environments that underly prosocial and altruistic behavior. Many researchers feel that hormones such as estrogen and ocytocin serve to make females and female brain physiology more caringly sensitized to the feelings of children, especially during pregnancy, breastfeeding and child care activities, and favors the development, therefore, of interpersonal sensitivity and empathy toward others. Testosterone encourages courageous risk-taking and aggression, and males possess far more of this hormone, which increases and decreases situationally. Both males and females have overlap in their hormones, and the balance differs from person to person, and in the context of environment and life experience. Vasopressin may also sensitize them to the feelings or pain of others, and is also present in males. Will the men of the more and more technologically sophisticated world, which requires more interpersonal sensitivity and potentially allows greater continuous proximity to children, retain their courage but naturally become more interpersonally sensitive, altruistic, ethical and empathic? And, as technology allows women to take risks and enter environments previously closed to them, will they retain their interpersonal sensitivity but increase in their levels of courage? Will we see both sexes together, then, travel and transform the uncharted new terrorities of human experience, co-charting and sharing an ethics-friendly path and process to home in both space and cyberspace?
It is relevant, as we prepare for the Millennium that celebrates the Birth of Christ, to note that in this century, at least three males, Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr, and Gandhi (whose society transforming achievements and pluralistic inclusivness Albert Einstein lived to see and who he so especially admired) have been very successful in expressing the sensitive, forgiving yet interpersonally courageous Love exemplified and called forth in men and women alike by Jesus. In doing so, they achieved major social change via courageous so-called passive resistance, moral suasion and example, and non-violent methods. And, during the same century, heretofore traditionally silenced, domestically focussed and passive females, using the same techniques more actively, intentionally and publicly than was typical for THEIR sex in earlier centuries, took risks that improved their society for the better by the achievement of votes and political involvement for women via Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony and later Alice Paul's examples, speeches, writing, marches and hunger strikes in the United States culminating in 1919, yes, the same year as the above mentioned eclipse. King and Gandhi openly expressed to the world that they had learned a great deal about patience, interpersonal influence, humility and love from their wives and mothers. In the 1800s, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Frederick Douglass changed the world when they collaborated. In this century too, did already interpersonally aware women like Rosa Parks learn to integrate the skills and lessons of courage of generations of fathers and husbands, but without emphasizing the aggressive side, in our society? Did all these people ally their activities with the sensitive concern for the future of children of all good parents? Dr. Joan Brown Campbell of the National Council of Churches and Rev. Jesse Jackson of the Rainbow Push Coalition, with their helpful mission that accelerated the end to conflict in the Balkans, are a prominent example of the success of gender-balanced, mutually integrative leadership. In many marriages, is it the process that more active women in fact bring out the social and emotional leadership and genius of men, and that men with a genius for relationship bring forth the best in their women? Are there people in Europe gazing at the eclipse, like Ibrahim Rugova, the women as well as men in his genogram and ecomap, Women in Black and their husbands and brothers, war-weary and peace-hopeful former Yugoslav Army and former KLA soldiers alike, as well as many people in Einstein's birthplace in Germany, too, and the peacekeepers and peacemakers of many lands and many others who we would see in our diagrams if we had their genograms and ecomaps before us, already growing in their understanding of this complementarity, mutual learning and balance?
Looking at both Maric and Einstein as people who were deeply concerned about peace, they admired the social expression of love and non-violent social change, but perhaps as a result of the separation and divorce, failed as a couple to fully mobilize themselves and their generation in that way. Einstein's lonely and ironic feelings about a nuclear fission arms race are a clear reminder of what can happen when families, even great families, neglect to immediately develop the female as a full public collaborator in courageous but ethical science, peacemaking and social reform as well as publicly crediting her for her child care role in raising young children. The English meaning of eve is the night before a very special and awaited day. The Hebrew meaning of Eve is life or to give life, and as Mil Eva's first name implies, she is one of thousands of millions of women who lived and gave life in many ways, not always very clearly and fully noticed, valued or recognized, at the eve of one Millennium. We are now watching the dawn of the next. Will Albert and Mileva's dawning daughters, granddaughters/great grandaughters and peacefully rising sons, grandsons and great grandsons, enact a more integrated collaboration? Will they begin a generational balance of nature and nurture to bring forth more balanced life, fathering and mothering, as well as non-violent social change and peace, involving far greater numbers of both men and women? Current generations have already begun to observe earthrises from the moon. Will coming maturing generations of men and women earth-appreciative astronauts alike understand that our names for sunset and sunrise or eve and dawn addressed merely our relative points of view from earth but we have matured enough to become aware in grateful reverence that they reflect an eternity of giving and receiving life as whole, shared, relational and universal as the dance of galaxies; of suns, planets, and moons; as we are reminded by the eclipse itself? Psychoanthropologist Carl Jung would have called this the integration of their feminine side by men and the better integration of their masculine side by women even as they remain differentiated individuals; he believed this better integration brings forth wholeness not only for the individual, but for their culture as well. Family systems theorist and genogram founding pioneers called it differentiation; retaining valuable separateness even while becoming at once more aware of and better connected to the whole. How would that look on life events of the talented squares and circles of the human family genogram? How would it look on the diagrams of time and space of the ecomap, the systems diagram for people and familes as they interact within their communities? Men and women can plot such generations and their activities into the present and future, using both the genogram and ecomap software as interactive companions with each other. One can imagine such generations reaching for the stars above, around and within, and exploring space/time relatedness and social, interpersonal relatedness with the same sense of wonder.
There can be little doubt that Maric faced much greater barriers to the acceptance and social integraton of her intellectual and family talents than Einstein himself, (who nevertheless had to struggle mightily against many types of prejudice in the Prussian and European scientific community.) Today, we know of many famed women scientists and their discoveries, and 11% of physicists are already female. Then, in Maric's time, the percentage must have been more like .00something% or less, and indeed the number of women in any profession must have been extremely low, compared to today. Even among women, supportive communities for women who believed in themselves as BOTH hands-on wives and mothers as well as professionals or intellectual contributors was extremely rare, and the mostly men physcists of the time, including Einstein, were actually embarrassed to overtly award, even symbolically, the importance of their family and emotional life. Yet, who can ignore the significance of Einstein's divorce-settlement gift of his Nobel prize-money to Maric for the support of herself and her children? Does it reflect some deep awareness and gratitude for the primacy of supportive intimacy, including intellectual intimacy, in bringing forth creativity, and reveal Albert's then ambivalent but always deep respect for his wife's spirit and intelligence, revealing him a rather unconsciously liberated and unchauvinistic fellow compared to other men of his times? (Use the software's Time Travel Feature to see the event 1922 Nobel Prize on Albert and Mileva's life events.)
Like all people, both Albert and Mileva were attempting to both integrate and transcend intellectual, cultural, gender and intensely personal family dynamics and events. While neither their achievements nor their failures can fully be separated from this complex motivation and interaction, much can be learned and observed from it, and will likely tell modern men and women much they will wish to consider about their own families, communities, societies and especially, the importance of honoring and promoting their relationships to children.
What implications does a study of Albert and Mileva Einstein and their families and their communities have for the scientific community within the human community? And what of the moral and ethical, thus, the interpersonal future of science? Is scientific morality and ethics enhanced by the more widespread presence of a female within the scientific relationship, and especially full collaboration of men and women? Are scientific communities in which women are rare or devalued intellectually more societally dangerous and aggressive than scientific communities where they are welcome and integrated? Are men of peace disempowered in social and political environments where public and private family work and endeavor is not gender-balanced?
What of all the women of Mileva's homeland and their husbands: ethnic Albanians, Serbs, Hungarians and others; how will their intellectual along with family commitment be balanced, discouraged, or encouraged, by the events of the Balkans today, including the upcoming eclipse? Is there something we can learn from other families around the world as we consider this topic and help the women of the Balkans, their men and their families, as their world focuses on them, and the simultaneous scientific cooperation occurring around the eclipse.
According to web pages and current work of an American physicist and her family which we just so happened to encounter with a simple search for Mileva Maric on the Internet, there is. (see http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Lab/9137/index.html.) We highly recommend an Internet visit to this page, among others mentioned in this essay, as avenues of very proper and natural follow-up after reading this essay. Imagine people like Dr. Herzenberg, her husband, and her daughter, and families of young men and women scientists and ethicists on all continents around the world today looking at and learning from the software or thinking about their genograms and ecomaps, as we stand with the people of Europe and the Balkans and look forward and up toward the eclipse.
It is interesting to wonder if Mileva Einstein lived today, since her interest in physics was also combined with other interests, including an additional interest in medicine (her younger brother Milos also became a medical doctor, and her son Eduard attempted to), would she herself, under the consistent encouragement of a larger community of female and supportive male professional peers, have found her way back to physics and excelled in not only exciting theoretical and ethical physics collaborations with Albert, but also medical physics? Would she have turned her attention to healing or preventing the physical damage of radiation, or to fusion or solar energy, which do not present the medical or ethical risks of fission? You can plot an alternative time line for her in both the ecomap and genogram software.
History has something to tell us about a then unmarried(?) contemporary of the Einstein and Maric, a woman physicist named Lise Meitner, a woman physicist who was the first to split the atom sometime after Einstein and Maric suffered their marital split. In the extremely male-skewed community of science of her time, it cannot surprise us how aggressively her work, (which was the next step based on the Einstein's theoretical and spiritually oriented E=mc2) was used. (Did Meitner give rise to the reclusive main character, the guilt-ridden, fearful and soul-searching female physicist on self-imposed sabbatical, of Fritjof Capra's "Mindwalk"?) But in a mindful community of gender balance, where hormonally less violence and aggression interested, more married with children women as well as hands-on parentally nurturing men are present at least as often as one-professional-in-the-family-only non-hands-on parents or singles, would immediate ethical guidelines have been drawn up when the splitting of the atom was achieved? Indeed, perhaps we will one day develop extremely sophisticated techniques of observing and investigating atoms without bombarding and splitting them at all.
We can imagine that Meitner's ecomap was like Mileva's - devoid of very many close friend sisters in science or even other professions working together with their men. And the men physicists of the time were similary caught in a virtually all-male political/economic culture. This may be still to true of the cultures of nations having trouble with ending the arms race today. Had there been more pairs who were equally dedicated to family and professional life, would a gender balanced UN or World Court earlier have addressed nuclear fission development and production as a crime against humanity until humanity was mature enough to develop interfamilial, intergenerational and in general social and even economic ethics? Would we have dropped the atom bomb on cities of hundreds of thousands of civilians in Hiroshima and, especially, Nagasaki if the decision-makers had been gender balanced and parentally involved in shared nurturing, etc? Today, we are in a similar situation with biogenetic research and cloning as well as nuclear science. Are there even more lost children in the life genogram of the family of Dr. Seed? Are the ethical Congresses and committees now composed in the nuclear "club" countries and countries undertaking biogenetic human research: US, Russia, China, France, England, Ukraine, India, Pakistan, Israel, South Africa, Scotland, and so on, peopled with hands-on child sensitized parents who are also scientifically knowledgeable? Are the committees gender-balanced? Are their members prized and selected because they are both psychologically, emotionally and intellectually intelligent, including showing responsible attentiveness and ongoing connection to their own children? Do their scientific communities value their involvement with their own children and other children? Are their members skilled, valued and involved interpersonal nurturers and ethicists, anthropologists, social wokers, psychologists, clergy and philanthropists, both male and female, as well as mathematicians and scientists, to accompany the usual suppliers and industrial C.E.O.s? If they are, we can breathe more easily, and if not, then what is the alternative but to make this fuller balance and partnership the rule rather than the exception? It is interesting to note that Einstein developed a strongly supportive relationship with his step-daughters, and was known for his open enjoyment of and love of children; and that later in life, Mileva became a tutor of children in many subjects. Perhaps the genograms and ecomaps of our best in this generation will be even more filled with interactions and experience with children before and while they undertake the science, business, international diplomacy and politics of today.
Mileva and Einstein had two sons as well, Hans Albert who was age 11-15 at the time of their separation/divorce, and Eduard, who was 5-9. Returning to the genogram and using the scrolling feature of the software, we see Albert Einstein's return to his mother's orbit in Germany after his "divorce" from Mileva, and perhaps some connection to his beloved deceased father's family via an affair/marriage with his cousin Elsa, who was both a first cousin as the daughter of Albert's mother's sister Fanny, and also a second cousin via Fanny's husband, who was a nephew of Einsten's father. Elsa was a recent divorcee. Like Mileva, she had lost one child; and raised two. Elsa had had a first born child was lost (died), and two other children - daughters, who Einstein gave his name and legally fully adopted as a stepfather. What happened to his relationships with his sons?
As Einstein and Mileva's relationship went from separation to divorce, his relations with his sons became more and more complex, conflicted, and distanced. Hans Albert, a very bright student, became increasingly self-sufficient, openly hostile to Einstein, and withdrew into successful work, eventually as a professor of hydraulics engineering at Berkeley, until he became, with his first (who died) and second wives, who were well-educated and professors themselves (since Hans Albert was, as we would expect, a little more successful than his parents in sustaining career equality in a marital partnership), became committed to the release of the love letters that now so importantly compel world cultural attention to the plight of this most deservedly famous wife, his mother, and wanted use the funds obtained to assist his brother, Eduard, who we will discuss next. (Scroll to the Hans Albert section of the genogram, and view his life events, and the timing of the release of the love letters). The effort so exhausted Hans Albert's first wife that she died shortly after a Swiss court ordered that the letters could be released, but it was successfully concluded by Hans Albert and his second wife, also a professor, but in the field of neurochemistry (so similar to our speculations about Mileva's likely choice if she had continued as a scientist). Hans Albert remained in contact with both of his parents during their lives, eventually forgiving and honoring his famous father at a distance but joining his ill father before Albert died at the opposite coast of America from Berkeley, in Princeton, in 1955. As you look at Hans Albert's life events in the software, and note his occupation as a hydraulics engineer who reengineers the path of our earth's rivers, speculate on his and his children's thoughts about learning so very late in his life about the existence of his sister Lieserl, and having to wait so long to have the legal right to release any verifiable publication of her existence. Hans Albert died in 1973. Perhaps if he had had our software, he may have gained some comfort in better understanding the flow of the river of his family's life, as it impacted on him, as well as the earth itself.
The Einstein's younger son Eduard was thought by many to show signs of great and substantial genius, interestingly, especially verbal and music genius in childhood and with great interest in medicine and psychology. Eduard's letters to Einstein suggest Eduard was strongly identified with his mother, both in feeling great insecurity about the acceptance and recognition of his own intelligence by others, in feeling abandoned by Einstein, and in feeling that feelings themselves were being somehow undervalued by his phsyical science-oriented family system. Using our software we can insert a hypothetical family therapist of today. Imagine how such a family therapist today would recognize that Eduard's young adulthood onset psychosis, (which was diagnosed then as schizophrenia but this is not clear; it came as a result of a failed love affair while he was starting medical school, today it might be seen as depression) was clearly exascerbated and resulted in great loss of self-esteem, after the insulin and electroschock therapy that was rained upon him by well-intentioned but overpowerful early medical-model psychiatrists of the day. These psychiatrists, of course, were not yet trained in family systems, which had not yet even begun to develop as the powerful school of helpful and healing that it is today. We can hypothesize that Eduard's mental problems were also a reflection of an overprotective overcloseness with Mileva, a divorced wife in a culture that knew nothing about healing the impact of divorce. Mileva may have resorted to becoming over-focussed on Eduard as a compensation for her loss and guilt over leaving Lieserl, as well as the shock of losing her marriage to the most famous man in the world to her rival, her husband's own cousin Elsa, (who eventually also nursed Einstein's powerful aging mother, Elsa's aunt, who had remained eternally hostile to Mileva and rejecting of her natural grandchildren in her later years.)
The Burgolzi hospital where Eduard was treated was later condemned by Carl Jung for its intrusively medically preoccupied approach, and of course, Jung is most known for his contributions about culture, and in particular, the integration and balance of male and female models and parent figures in the development and psychology of people as they grow in life. But the Einstein-Maric family must not have had any contact with Jung, and Eduard kept a picture of only Freud over his bed as a young teen and implored his father's interest in the "talking cure". Einstein felt disdainful and doubtful about communicating about talking therapy with Eduard, and only began to relent about this just as he was forced to flee Europe by the Nazis with a price on his head. A family therapist today would recognize that whatever hereditary or environmental modeling factors were interacting and intensifying\each other in Eduard's psychoses, they were deeply stressed and worsened by the complexities of the family secret, the lack of commuication between Einstein and Mileva, and the abolute cut-off of Mileva's sons by Einstein's mother. (The middle and less-favorite child of the Maric's, Mileva's sister Zorka also suffered from psychiatric depression and a sense of abandonment and distance from people and was involved in Eduard's childcare after Einstein left Mileva.) Like Einstein's mother, Mileva played piano well, and Eduard, who had wanted to become a doctor or psychiatrist, did play piano magnificently until access to a piano was denied him in an institution that in later years became more concerned with managing care in an overcrowded ward than esteeming the needs of this man who was a sad shadow of his former promise, the youngest son of Albert Einstein. It is important to note that this very famous, sensitive and tragic son ominously fantasized, in a letter of psychosis-induced warning that came true, that his father's science would be used to develop a bomb, long before the Manhattan project. Somehow Eduard "knew" that what his father had intended be used defensively would instead, against Einstein's wishes and values, ultimately be used against civilians. Amazingly, although he was visited by a kind family friend who also was a biographer of Einstein, a man named Seelig (the name means soul in German), Einstein, already in America, never visited (or phoned?) Eduard during the many years of Eduard's institutionalization. Today, with family systems therapy available in most hospitals, this probably could not have happened. The family would have had an opportunity to see their own genogram and ecomap, both Mileva and Einstein, as likely Hans Albert as well, would have been called to assist and take part in the recovery of Eduard in family sessions. A family therapist would probably have even helped Eduard's grandmother, Pauline Koch, to better accept her daughter-in-law and her grandchildren even as the therapist assisted Einstein to gain more interpersonal honesty in dealing with his mother. Perhaps, then, possibly with the help of both talking therapy family sessions using genograms and ecomaps, and some use of diet and perhaps far milder medication now widely in use for depression, Eduard would have overcome his mental problems, fulfilled his both inherited and a more mutually parented and supported unique genius, and become world-reknowned himself as a great soul of medical or psychiatric genius, giving us, as Jung did, great insights into recovery from real difficulty, and what is necessary to heal depression and despair in millions of people around the world, especially in places racked by family separation like the current Balkans. Could Eduard have overcome depression, continued to study and produce, and achieved a Nobel prize himself in medicine/ psychology? This was certainly one of Eduard's own fantasies, but perhaps, with the help of family systems assistance, it would not have remained just fantasy for this youngest child of this brilliant family. But today, such an alternative time line for Eduard can exist only in our imaginations and the software. But for some other fellow human beings, if we view Eduard carefully in the genogram and ecomap, such healing becomes possible and likely.
One can use the software to depict these imaginary hypothetical and
ideal scenarios, and discuss their probabilities, based on many of the
interacting factors that can be easily viewed/entered in the software.
There are actually many living Einstein-Maric descendants (including
biological and adopted children), some who know, and perhaps some who
do not know who they are. These genograms and ecomaps and the software
may be of great private, and personal interest to them. But Einstein-Maric
ultimately belongs to all of us, and we cannot help but speculate about
them, and wish them well, in the best of our hearts, minds and spirit.
Our thought experiments using the and
software are best continued by applying them to the families and communities
that each of us holds dear or wishes to assist. For such imagination, with
the help of the structured thought experiment offered by the software, may
be the family systems' relativity's greatest gift, if we believe as Einstein
did, that for humble human beings wondering at their universe, ultimately
"Imagination is more important than knowledge".
Certainly, all these hypotheses and "thought experiments" (and, as we have seen, "feeling experiments", as well) can, like alternative pasts, presents, and futures be tracked by the software, But, they are only imagination, just theoretical, and still a vast oversimplification. What happened to these Einstein-Marics really happened; we can no longer go back and help Albert toward the GTOE or help Mileva receive the world support due her as both pioneer scientist and mother. All relationships unfold and evolve, in both free creation and with multideterminism both, in a complex series of physical and psychological realities, givens, interacting variables and events, order along with chaos, as some philosophers call it.
But, as Einstein and physicists know so well, change but a few major variables, or a general trend, in a densely interconnected field, and the outcome of the experiment changes drastically. It is impacted in part by the variables chosen and valued by the observer. With this software, one can observe some of the genetic, psychological, family, history of science, and cultural related variables that the Einstein family, all in one brief shared lifetime, encountered in their journey in the interpersonal as well as physical universe.
Theirs were genograms and ecomaps of enormous talent, incredible fame, enough love to sustain universal intelligence and creativity as well as a loving household for some time, a wrenching family secret, complex personal dynamics toward their families of origin of both Mileva and Albert, and a climate of both within-family and culture-wide patriarchal (rather then full partnership) orientation, in which women were not only NOT expected to be intellectual partners as well as emotional collaborators with their husbands, but a culture in which neither husbands or wives were offered any, let alone sufficient, societal leave, guidance or assistance, toward integrating family and career for the joy and benefit of their children and their communities both. In spite of these pressures and within the limits of their time and space, Einstein and Maric clearly achieved, "relatively" speaking, of course, an incredible, truly revolutionary and epochal breakthrough that echoed throughout their century and far into the future. Today, in our timeless hearts, minds and spirits, we wish them well.
Like most of the families of the Bible, both Mileva and Albert, in their own way, succeeded even as they also failed, and teach us a great deal about forgiveness and the need for reunion, atonement and redemption as it is expressed within each person and their communities over time. Even if Albert seems to have stumbled in thinking that the "thoughts of God" whom he sought so fervently in his genius physics equations were somehow disinterested or at a distance from his personal life, he adamantly maintained throughout his life, even among a sometimes skeptical scientific community, that "God is subtle, but not mean" and "God does not play dice with the Universe". Both Mileva and Albert retained a deep faith in God and the Universe, and the possibilities for humankind. They attempted tolerance and support for others as they sought for tolerance and support for themselves, and they sustained and did the best they knew to provide for life under difficult circumstances. It cannot hurt to remarry them now - Elsa won't mind. (Maybe she herself felt her relationship with Albert was perhaps a helpful stopgap yet not a full psychological marriage albeit a legal one; maybe it was something else, and maybe she has reunited with her Max.) And Pauline won't mind either; she'll be proud and agree that Hermann was right in giving his permission. Both Mileva and Albert, and their children, paid a high price for attempting a live thought experiment, combining family, genius, personal development, and fame at a time and culture not yet fully ready for them. It was a price that, especially once they separated, made it even more difficult for them to stand together effectively and mobilize their peers toward defending the world against the forces of scapegoating hatred, ethnic elitism, and lust for power, that shook Europe, America, Asia, and all the world, and cost them and millions of their peers so much. Perhaps finally their own family story can better demonstrate that even the competitive atmosphere of the Cold War and extremely polarized economic models of those times grew out of the lack of gender balance and the paucity of husband and wife intellectual/family collaboration in many fields including physics, but also economics, cultural understanding and family life study. As we end the twentieth century, will such gender balance begin to relax and resolve the aggressive/defensive compete/control mindset that still underlies the covet of nuclear materials by so many nations, and still prevents us from beating our swords into ploughshares... and wedding cups?.
Clearly, our theories must take into them the relativity of families; families who have scientists involved in nuclear and other advanced research around the world, and indeed, families that have peacemakers and peacekeepers in them, whether as statespeople at a distance, or on the ground conflict-containers and mediators in the field, families in the Balkans where women are not encouraged to go to school even while their brothers and sons wield guns; and many more families, families of every place and time on earth will lead us to transform, redeem and transcend, making progress and peace together, on earth even as we look up into and enter space.
In this context, in the Balkans and worldwide, we are remembering the Einstein-Maric parents and children. We remember their warnings, valued memories, and life sagas as parents, creators, pioneers, and children, as we look up at the sun and moon and feel our earth, in their awesome mutual dynamic balance and harmony. With this remembrance and example, we can perhaps better effect the development and understanding of interpersonal responsibility, interconnectedness, spirit and ethics as a relativity just as critical and full of light, as we wonder equally at the mysteries of physical and interpersonal space. As the famous quotation by St. Augustine reveals reflecting so many centuries of concern, "People travel to wonder at the height of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motion of the stars; and they pass by themselves without wondering." This time, as we prepare for and watch for this eclipse, we will thoughtfully and lovingly wonder at the family of Einstein-Maric and, at ourselves, as well.
The original, old English definition of government is one's own internalized (as opposed to externally enforced) and self-understood regulation of one's moral and ethical behavior. It is, ultimately, a spiritual and highly personal concept, an experience related to the mind, heart and the soul.
In the twentieth century, one of Einstein's friends in America once interviewed Einstein about international alliance and global governance. Interestingly Einstein, who at the time already know he had failed miserably at two marriages and had emotionally hurt the two women he had married, at least partially realized he had brought great emotional pain to some of his children, and blamed himself in part for unwittingly contributing to a science that resulted in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, still gave his interviewer the following answer: "...The idea of a world government is nothing more than the proper marriage of governments among themselves".
Now, with our increased social interest in the talents of women like Mileva, and the importance of male and female truly humble cooperation without discrimination for the human family, we are in a position to correct and assist Einstein in a most obvious way brought about by 20-20 century hindsight and a thought experiment question:
Can any marriage, even genius marriage, let alone international marriages and alliances of governments, fully reach their potential, be BOTH proper and natural, and last, unless the marriage and its community and culture provide equal and dynamically integrated love, support, inclusion, presence and attention, including full political expression, to all men AND women? Mustn't marriage and government both equally include all husbands, all wives and their sons AND daughters, and encourage their mutual and supportive collaboration with each other on all the fields of human endeavor, including science and parenting, education, home-hearth, local-global community prosperity-building, intimacy and childcare? National and international government and peacemaking must involve self-governance and self-expression (democracy/full representation) by both men and women in fully ethical collaboration and balance; this will always involve personal, political and spiritual dimensions, whether it be in the context of a family, a local neighborhood group, a task force, a multinational corporation, a state, a nation, or an alliance as large as NATO, OSCE, a UN, an Internet, or a space federation. Progress is occurring; the women of Kuwait, for example, have obtained the right to vote in the past few months, just before the end of the twentieth century, much as American women gained that right at the time of the 1919 eclipse. As we gaze at each other as we gaze at the eclipse, we must run the thought experiment: How long can entities that remain mostly male-skewed instead of gender balanced be able to fulfill their purpose, let alone any genius potentials of their human relativity? With the dawn of the millennium, does human government love and understand itself enough to be singing about, "getting married in the morning?", as the song from "My Fair Lady", the ancient Greek Pygmalion story which is just as much a parable about the transformation of men who have been societally advantaged as it is about the full education of women who have been disadvantaged.
We on planet earth will succeed as much as we include and coherently view men and women as individuals as well as together, equally important although similarly and sometimes dissimilarly expressive of their unique combinations of gifts because of context, both nature and/with nurture, certainly at times functioning independently of each other, yet always intertwined as complexly and mysteriously as the chromosomes they provide to each other, and the double helix itself. A happy balance is mutual; it is mutually arrived at, over time, as all are included and welcomed to all aspects of important work. Should an equation worthy of exploration in the interpersonal universe be: E=mc**2 where Enlightenment equals the mutuality of cooperation squared, and should it include E=mg**2, Enlightenment as the mutuality of gender squared, not only between men and women persay, but between the masculine and feminine aspects (what Jung called the animus and anima and others have called the yang and yin) of our psyches, of the gifts each person has developed in nature with nurture, especially as we work and learn in dynamic collaboration, together?
In this essay, we have concentrated on the importance of a marriage of a man and a woman. This is not meant to imply that other kinds of relationships between people are of any less value in the history of the human family in all the places and times we've all lived. Indeed, it is absolutely certain that the viewing of the genograms and ecomaps of human history to date would reveal very many profoundly moving, intellectual, creative, and socially caretaking interactions among many people of the same sex with each other in many types and forms of relationship. But because human beings are born of male and female physiologically, and because such large changes have occurred and are continuing regarding the status of women as it relates to their participation in all aspects of society including the creative potentials of marriage, we have concentrated here on thought experiments about the male-female bond, its potential, its importance as the central trunk of the human family tree from which all the variety of human culture and history has emerged, its characteristics and struggles during the twentieth century, and its trancendant possibilities as we enter the twenty-first century and the new Millennium.
When men and women marry, if their marriages are experienced and viewed as between fully recognized mutually complementary equals, will they produce both genius and harmony within the life of the family and its children, right along with the life of the community? Will such marriages be very long-lived marriages, with both partners living longer and longer lives as well, active in co-intimacy and developmentally-based co-parenting (since infants, toddlers, older children and teens have different needs) and co-science and co-government with each other more often? Over the life cycle, will this experience of greater intimacy and collaboration actually also make it easier to balance their closeness with trusted and proud encouragement of each others' independent projects and recreation with others? Will they better respect and enjoy each other's differences and find it easier to give each other space to develop as full individuals, yet see and honor more clearly their creative interdependence in serving family and community together, as well? Perhaps, surrounded as we are right now by our current and probably still very early level of technology still needed to help us see a little more clearly what we could have seen all along; we can now see that in a culture of men and women who Love each other as full equals, one exciting, faithful, life-sustaining, collaborative, fullfilling, intellectually stimulating, tender, tactile, eye-gazing, long-lived, fully spiritual as well as physical marriage may eventually be the desired and cherished state of affairs for even more men and women and their children. As an important template of mutuality and partnership learned by children observing their parents, it will make the activities of all people, throughout all the wonderful opportunities life presents, more intelligent, healthy, and successful as we attend to any task. It will strengthen the mutual, empathic, ethical and collaborative dance of all types of human relationships, and likely assist us as we are learning more and more about the dance of the smallest particles of physical being that interconnect and convey the information of our Universe in space/time as part of the simultaneous and spiritual process, also at work in our global environment and human relationships. It will be a time when genius is not the exception, but the norm, and it will be full of nearly infinite happiness, available to us all as we travel through Cosmos and Creation at speeds of light and grateful enlightenment in the sure knowledge that the Infinity we have always been a part of is far more than enough to content and bless us.
Ultimately, all works are activities of Hope and Faith. But our humble thought experiments, whether in software or just in our hearts' and minds' eyes, can clearly help us if we include more of the variables that we have for too much of this ending century and Millennium left out, especially giving far more equal weight to those of women and children, like Albert's beloved Mileva and all their children, as well as our own. As we gaze at the next eclipse, we will know that we are leaving the old Millennial Eve, just as we are beginning a new Millennial Dawn. In the next Millennium, we will probably not only live on Earth in peace, but on the Moon itself, as a first and necessary step toward other planets, galaxies and into the vastness of Creation. We will know that the interplaying shadows of earth and moon upon each other as eclipses in the light reveal just a hint of truly universal relativity, present on earth in our interpersonal and social nature and nurture as it is above. In the next Millennium, we will better perceive not just genius males, but genius females, leaders of both sexes equally supportive to each other, involved and collaborative, and bringing their gifts to all fields, from science and math to medicine, mental health, human systems, family life and what too often throughout the twentieth century seemed an oxymoron, political ethics. This is the marriage all earth and heaven will celebrate, in time. It is our humble hope that this software and essay will help.
In one of her love letters, Mileva wrote to Albert a lyrical, poetic and truly inspiring and deeply spiritual passage, one which perhaps greatly solidified their vision and creative bond. At the time, even though she was clearly referring to herself as much as all humanity, she used only the male pronoun in her writing, for she did not realize the impact of leaving females and thus, herself, out of the imagination and equation, and confining them to enforced limites of families or roles that failed to celebrate, integrate and sustain the feminine, and every female's full intellectual, spiritual, cognitive, ethical and emotional (limbic) intelligence and contribution, as much as it does every male's. Today, as we, men and women of all nations and all religions, all citizens be we displaced, nationals, and/or global citizens, schoolchildren and statespeople gazing up at the eclipse over the Balkans or around the Internet, we will offer, now respectfully corrected for pronoun, to include both genders in Mileva's and Albert's own words:
Mileva:
"I don't think the structure of the human skull is to be blamed for any human's inability to understand the concept of infinity. Everyone would certainly be able to understand it if, when young, and while developing his or her sense of perception, one were allowed to venture into the universe, rather than being cooped up on earth, or worse yet, confined within four walls in a provincial backwater. If someone can conceive of infinite happiness, he or she should be able to comprehend the infinity of space - I should think it much easier."
Albert:
"Strange is our situation here upon earth. Each of us comes for a short visit, not knowing why, yet sometimes to divine a purpose... however, there is one thing we do know...that (we) are here for the sake of other(s)...for those upon whose smile and well-being our own happiness depends, and also for the countless unknown souls with whose fate we are connected by a bond of sympathy..."
The Einstein Papers Project (Drs. John Stachel, Robert Schulmann,
Jurgen Renn, Families and Colleagues)
Dr. Sandra Witelson, Family and Colleagues
Dr. Stephen and Mrs. Jane Hawking, and their Families
Mr and Mrs. Roger Highfield and Mr. and Mrs. Paul Carter and Families
The International Space Station
NASA
The European Space Agency
Women in Science
Minorities in Science
The American Physical Society
Lisa's Family and the Families of the Information Technology Community
Fritjof Capra, The Elmwood Institute
The American Association of Marriage and Family Therapy
The American Family Therapy Academy
European Profeminists-L
HUSITA-L
All National and International Governments, especially along the Eclipse Path
Dr. Ibrahim Rugova and Family
Rev. Joan Brown Campbell and Rev. Jesse Jackson
Women (in Black) of the Balkans and Their Families
Amnesty International
many others
and These software packages are already in widespread use in over 20 countries: by therapists, counselors, pastoral counselors, social workers, psychologists, psychiatrists, mediators, anthropologists, family historians, consultants and biographers around the world. It is assisting their indepth assistance as well as hope and faith in the families they have been called upon to work for and with.
We will make copies of and that are loaded with the Einstein-Maric family genogram
and ecomap files available to scholars, students who are interested in
them. Although a great deal of the data and information has been entered
into these files, we realize they are only partially complete as we are
not primarily biographers of the Einstein-Maric family although we here
are involved in work that clearly is related to them and all families. We
hope the full comprehensiveness and accuracy of these files may be
expanded and better comprehended by people who are studying and learning
from the life of this particular family. We hope they will enjoy them as a
precursor to using the software and its design, even more importantly, the
"modes of thinking", the multidimensional feeling-thought experiments
with faith and hope that it suggests, to better understand their own
families and communities.
Our first Einstein family genogram and ecomap were donated to our local Einstein High school, and our local library, in 1995 and 1996, on the anniversaries of the specific theory and the general theory of relativity, respectively. We have added to them from time to time; there is so much written about this family, and it seems like every day brings a new fact, a new insight.
(A Word About (tm): Some may call tm a Trademark, but we want think of its as meaning thoughtmark or thoughtful mark. As male and female stewards of family and work, we use the phrase in honor of all spiritually motivated thought and feeling experiments and offerings. And while we are formally and legally an "incorporated" entity, thus, an "inc." we are in our spirits, an "in cooperation" project, in cooperation with every member of our human family in ways which we can only humbly and dimly realize. In that spirit, we welcome all to join with and assist us, and each other, in the interdisciplinary "Relativity Project". We have already learned so much from others, and are looking forward to fuller and more ongoing collaborations in the spirit of full partnership among equals.
A final word about dates of publication and references. The first famous relativity paper of Einstein-Maric was submitted without references in 1905, and received by the Annalen der Physik journal on June 30th of that year. We feel this probably was more a matter of time in the urgency to get it out, than anything else. We had originally planned to release this essay on the Internet on June 30th, 1999. But a few more days were needed to allow for us to experience the work that we, as a couple, enjoyed togather, in a result of fuller mutual intellectual/spiritual collaboration of husbands and wives now already more possible in our culture. Still, we did not want to delay its release for many references, and we hope to add some more of the many references to this paper as soon as possible. Until then, we must thank many authors, not only Highfield and Carter, Stayen, Pais, Stachel, Tobey, Herzenberg, Capra, but many others whose names we hope to add very soon, and the emotional support of family, friends and community, past, present and future. We hope all will feel and know they have contributed toward something that is collectively important, worthwhile, and, under the pressure of current events and synchronicities, at the time this was written, seemed a little like an invention almost urgently born of the necessity of the times, too.
Signed,
Co-Founders, WonderWare, Inc.
"How happy and proud I will be when the two of us together will have brought our work on (relativity) to a victorious conclusion."
- Husband to Wife, 1901 Berne, Switzerland
- Husband and Wife to Each Other and YOU and the Human Family via this software; yesterday, today and tomorrow and NOW, SpaceTime