The culture of Einstein

Einstein as feminist target
Einstein is also at the center of one of the hotter debates to emerge from feminist theory. A wide range of scholars has suggested that his first wife, Mileva Maric, with whom he studied at the Polytechnic School, made equal or even greater contributions to his great 1905 papers but was denied credit.

Einstein’s letters to Maric include several references to “our work” and “our research,” and one biographer claimed to have seen an early draft of one the 1905 papers that was signed by both of them. Moreover, when Einstein won the Nobel Prize in 1921 — two years after they divorced, quite bitterly — he gave Maric the money.

The question is one that touches off heated arguments. In 1990, the dispute had become important enough that the American Association for the Advancement of Science convened a panel discussion, where scholars pursued what they saw as her vindication. A PBS documentary, “Einstein’s Wife,” made the case so compellingly that in an online poll on its Web site, 77 percent of respondents thought Maric “collaborated” with Einstein on the 1905 papers.

Slide show Life of genius View a photographic timeline spanning the life of Albert Einstein. more photos

Editors of Einstein’s papers officially declared neutrality, but unofficially, Janssen and others say claims that Maric had much to do with Einstein’s greatest work were unfounded.

Often, feminist scholars “portray the editors of the Einstein Papers Project as a bunch of male chauvinist pigs who would not admit this even in the face of uncontrovertible evidence,” Janssen said. “The editors would be quite happy to acknowledge something like that. I, in particular, have written very unflattering things about Einstein, but for this particular proposition there’s just not a shred of evidence.”

Einstein and religion
Einstein’s famous rejection of the randomness inherent in quantum mechanics — “I cannot believe that God would choose to play dice with the universe” — was long ago appropriated by religious thinkers as proof that the world’s greatest scientist accepted the existence of God.

Einstein himself made it plain, however, that he did not. Such interpretations, he wrote in 1954, were “a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly.”

For Einstein, references to God were a convenient metaphor — easy-to-grasp shorthand, he wrote, for “the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.”

It is perhaps ironic, then, that Einstein’s theories contributed significantly to the revival of Christian fundamentalism in the last century.

INTERACTIVE Putting Einstein to the test Why relativity is right ... and still relevant

Relativity theory implies that measurements, perceptions and observations long thought to be fixed really aren’t, a potentially mortal blow to belief in immutable truths based in natural law. Those truths would include religious accounts of creation and history, influencing some religious scholars and leaders to regard relativity as an attack on faith.

At its 1982 General Convention, the Episcopal Church noted that the “dogma” of creationism “has been discredited by scientific and theologic studies” — a contention rejected by Christian fundamentalists and one that is at the heart of Christian political movements to compel public schools to at least acknowledge the biblical account of creation.

“So where did moral relativism gain its footing in a nation founded on Judeo-Christian principles?” Kelly Hollowell of the fundamentalist Center for Reclaiming America wrote in 2004. “It actually started in the 1920s when a belief began to circulate in the U.S. that there were no longer any absolutes, specifically, of time and space, of good and evil, of knowledge and above all of human value.

“This belief system was built on the work of at least two prominent scientists: Albert Einstein and Charles Darwin.”

Einstein as charlatan
Here’s the ultimate proof of Einstein’s fame: There is a small but committed band of authors and bloggers dedicated to proving that relativity is wrong and that Einstein was a cheat.

In “Albert Einstein: The Incorrigible Plagiarist,” for example, Christopher Jon Bjerknes argues that Einstein stole all his ideas from earlier theorists, especially his first wife, while in “Proof of the Falsity of the Special Theory of Relativity,” Erik J. Lange puts forth, well, his proof of the falsity of the special theory of relativity.

There is, in fact, something of a publishing sub-industry specializing in books whose titles include variations of “the Einstein Myth” or “The Einstein Hoax,” dismissing relativity as, in essence, a religion.

But we already know what Einstein said about religion.

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