Jan,
I'm glad you are now expert after googling Meleva, you should really have googled Einstein instead- that Nobel prize money that went to a divorce settlement- he won it for the photoelectric effect, not relativity.
Even so, a few controversial people say "the ideas may have been Albert's, but Mileva did the mathematics." I guess then we should call them the Milelva transformations instead of . . . the Lorenz transformations! See Einstein is not known for being a mathematician because it was his ideas that were revolutionary, not the math behind them.
The bottom line is that even if it was true then I say Big Whoop. Stop belittling female scientist by trying to claim the most famous scientific discovery of the 20th century.
Give Jan a piece of your mind here.
PS: NJIT made an official press release about me and a friend last week, Press Release
Classic media, messed the story up a bit, see the real deal here on my website.
While Einstein's theory of special relativity makes use of the Lorenz transformations, his general theory of relativity requires much more difficult math. Which it's probably he could have done anyway. Since, really, the math partially leads to the ideas. He probably didn't wake up one day and go, "You know, I think Newton was wrong. Let me ask Mileva how I can show that with math."
ReplyDeleteWhile Wikipedia mentions that Mileva may possibly have helped on relativity, it makes no mention of her help with the Photoelectric Effect. She got part of the Noble Prize money merely because they were married when he wrote the paper.
ReplyDeleteSome people further speculate that the reason Einstein wrote the papers in the patent office was his need for solitude when he wrote, something that make a colllaboration with his wife unlikly
Also Wikipedia clearly states that no one is sure what happened to the first child, probably because she was illegitamate. So there doesn't seem to be any evidence that Einstein forced her to do anything.
Dear Jan Elliot:
ReplyDeleteIn your Stone Soup comic, you statee that Einstein published no useful physics papers after his divorce, and you further insinuate this this resulted because his wife Mileva was no longer helping him.
This is simply not true. In 1924. Satyendra Nath Bose together with Einstein published a paper predicting a state of matter called a Bose-Einstein condensate as well as desribing certain statistics of light. This is an extremly important result in quantum physics which happened a full 5 years after the divorce.