More Than a Word's Worth

Are You a Creative Genius?

Posted on 12. September 2010 by Nancy Pinard

I’m still hanging out in the Jurgen Neffe biography of Einstein, where he talks about the recurrent personality traits of geniuses (p. 25) based on research by Howard Gardner of Harvard. Gardner compared Einstein with the likes of Picasso, Freud, and Gandhi, plus three others less known. He discovered in all of them an intersection of the childlike with the mature. Gardner credits Einstein’s parents for leaving him alone with his dream-like childhood existence, the solitude they granted him, with his ability as a mature scientist to revisit and incorporate the “flow” of his childhood years.

Geniuses, Gardner says, require a decade of practical and theoretical work before they blossom. In Einstein’s case, he read and grappled mentally with ideas for ten years before arriving at the special theory of relativity. (FYI: The special theory is distinguished from and is a precursor to the theory of relativity.) Likewise, Einstein’s favorite composer, Mozart, wrote music for ten years before composing anything that made history. And it’s not about IQ. Creative geniuses have IQs well above normal, but the IQ above 150, the super IQ, almost never yields a creative genius, according to Gardner.

Creative geniuses are propelled by a force of will that is characterized by determination and perseverance without boundaries. They meet with disapproval for characteristics like stubbornness. Einstein was not an exceptional student in many subjects (though he excelled in math and physics) but was kicked out of school in Germany for provoking teachers with rebellious contempt. When he claimed he had done nothing wrong, his teacher, Dr. Joseph Degenhart, said, “Your mere presence here undermines the class’s respect for me.”

Genius desires independence of thought, the ability to stand alone on the frontier. “Authority gone to one’s head,” Einstein said, “is the greatest enemy of truth.”

Posted in Einstein, genius | 6 Comments

Diagnosing a Genius

Posted on 11. September 2010 by Nancy Pinard

According to Jurgen Neffe (Einstein, pp. 36-7), various behaviors that Einstein exhibited as a child, specifically delayed speech, fits of temper, an ability to detach and focus on an interest in a way that rendered him inaccessible to those around him, and problems with social interactions have led some to scientists to conclude that Einstein had Asperger’s syndrome.
Thomas Sowell of Stanford established a special designation for children of high intelligence who are slow to speak and withdraw from others. His name for the condition? Einstein Syndrome.

Posted in Einstein, genius | 3 Comments

A Ghoulish Demise

Posted on 10. September 2010 by Nancy Pinard

Jurgen Neffe begins his biography of Einstein at the autopsy (Neffe, Einstein, p. 3-5). The hospital is in Princeton, New Jersey; the medical examiner is Thomas Harvey. Neffe describes the Y-shaped cut: “He places his scalpel behind one of the dead man’s ears and pulls it hard over the neck and thorax through the cold, pale skin down to the abdomen. Then he repeats this cut beginning with the other ear.”
Okay, I’m starting to squirm. This is Einstein we’re talking about and suddenly it seems that I, too, subscribe to some notion of his immortality.
Wait. It gets worse. It seems that this man, Thomas Harvey, decided he’d like to take a little souvenir. Oh, he’d performed autopsies on plenty of physicists. Princeton, Neffe tells us, is brimming with them, but only once before had he come in contact with Einstein. It happened he’d asked Albert for a urine sample and upon receipt of the specimen held the warm cup thinking, “This is from the greatest genius of all time.” You get the sensibility.
So, now, Harvey, M.E. decides this is his BIG chance. He cuts off Einstein’s head and scoops out the brain, holding it up before him like poor Yorick’s skull. For this, he loses his job. Imagine that. Someone notices that the headless man in the freezer has an Einstein tag on his toe.
But to Harvey it’s worth it. He has the prize! He vivisects the brain into two hundred cubes and divides them into two jars. These he carries, wrapped in rags, alternately in a beer cooler (I’m picturing the styrofoam kind with the squeaky lid) and a cardboard box which he hides in the closet of his various student apartments. For forty years he moves around the country, working in factories, hoarding the brain. Finally, right before he dies, Harvey returns it to Princeton, apparently trusting only his original employer with his treasure.

It seems like Harvey was also the name of a large rabbit.

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Photo Gallery

Posted on 8. September 2010 by Nancy Pinard

Everyone is familiar with the iconic pictures of Einstein as an old man. He has a wild halo of white hair and looks somewhat mad.
As with Darwin, whose iconic photo also shows him as old, bearded, and white-haired, I wonder if such images are intended to replace God in the minds of viewers–as an adjunct to the never-ending debate between science and faith.

More interesting to me are the photographs of the younger Einsteins, the ones we haven’t seen until they have become cliches.

Posted in Einstein, Einstein's children, family members | 6 Comments

The Mileva Maric Controversy

Posted on 7. September 2010 by Nancy Pinard

Einstein married his classmate, Mileva Maric, the only woman in theoretical physics to enter Zurich Polytechnical Institute the same year. She was four years his elder and a disciplined student, having worked very hard to gain entrance to boys/men’s institutions in order to study physics. Here’s where the controversy enters: How much credit should she be given for the theory of relativity? PBS did a documentary on her, Einstein’s Wife, http://www.pbs.org/opb/einsteinswife/science/mquest.htm that met with a firestorm of criticism http://www.pbs.org/ombudsman/2006/12/einsteins_wife_the_relative_motion_of_facts.html such that the website was later changed, though, to my eye, no one on the program was giving her credit, but rather pointing to the possibility that she had worked on it. One biographer, a Serbian woman writing in Russian, Desanka Trbuhovic-Gjuric, claims that Mileva’s name was on one submission of the manuscript, which she had seen on microfilm. And then there’s the unlikely fact of Einstein having produced four papers in 1905, all on radically different subjects, when heretofore he had not demonstrated himself a particularly diligent worker. One of those papers contained content on the motion of molecules that can only be traced to Mileva’s work with Phillip Lenard at Heidelberg University the semester she fled from what she perceived as a threat in her growing intimacy with Einstein. (Indeed, a threat it turned out to be! But that’s for a later post.) This is not conclusive evidence, surely, for it’s known that Einstein always needed a sounding board and it’s logical that Mileva would have served that role without the ideas being hers. Nonetheless, in the love letters Einstein wrote to Mileva before their marriage, he made repeated reference to “our work” and there’s that peculiar fact that in the divorce settlement, he offered her all the proceeds from the Nobel Prize he later won. Why that settlement? He had other sources of income. Their son, Hans Albert, also reports seeing his parents working together at the table, discussing, writing, reading. But he was still a child and the content was beyond his understanding.

After she failed to pass her exams at the Polytechnic and was not granted a degree–she had taken that one semester in Heidelberg and was three months pregnant with Einstein’s illegitimate daughter–it might be argued that his would be the name they would put on the manuscripts, similar to the way Zelda Fitzgerald sold some short stories under F. Scott’s name to garner more money.

But that’s a speculation. Having just finished a novelization of the Darwin’s family life, I’m aware that much work done by the women of the household (all the editing, for example) went unacknowledged. It was difficult to be an accomplished woman in that era.

Here is an article that examines each piece of evidence, claiming that the Maric contribution is revisionist history. https://webspace.utexas.edu/aam829/1/m/Maric_files/EvidenceMaric.pdf .

Posted in Mileva Maric, Theory of Relativity | 7 Comments

Literary Quote of the Day

Posted on 2. September 2010 by Nancy Pinard

On my homepage I have a Google gadget called Literary Quote of the Day. Today’s is by Henry Miller–whom I am surprised to find myself quoting. I once saw a documentary-style biopic on him in which he, a skinny, hollow-chested old man, treaded water in a swimming pool and talked about himself incessantly, like a bad book trailer on YouTube. Alas, he pops up onto my homepage to say something important, which on my good days, I actually believe: “Back of every creation, supporting it like an arch, is faith. Enthusiasm is nothing; it comes and goes. But if one believes, then miracles occur.”

Amen.

Posted in writing | 10 Comments

The Squirrely Place

Posted on 30. August 2010 by Nancy Pinard

I’m reading the biography, learning the science, and still, I’m in that awful, squirrely place where the locus of the novel refuses to emerge. I watched a Nova dvd over the weekend, one called Einstein Revealed, and am somewhat into another called Einstein’s Big Idea. I’m familiar with much of the biographical material already, so it’s the science that I’m getting, the pictures revealing more than the chapters in Isaacson, in terms of understanding his view of the universe. The conflict Nova chose was science vs personal relationships, as Einstein seemed to want more than anything to be left alone to think about the physics of the universe and used science to avoid all the messy stuff of household life. A needy wife? Two little boys? Aha! Better to go to work than to be interrupted by personal need! He justified this by siting his genius as some obligation to humanity, but it seems to me that thinking about science is his drug of choice. Which of us wouldn’t like a really good reason to avoid feeling all the messy adventures life offers up? How much easier it is to do what one is good at and take satisfaction from accomplishment.

But to put a needy, depressed woman on the page? How long will the reader put up with that? These people need to emerge for me. So far, I seem to be holding them at bay.

I’m reading two novels, simultaneously, that have first-person, schizophrenic narrators, Lowboy by John Ray and Atmospheric Disturbances by Rivka Galchen. Lowboy is comic and it’s clear, via the entrance of an omniscient narrator, that the protagonist is the schizophrenic because the omni narrator pops up (not according to any plan I can see, but just when I needed him/her) to provide a measuring stick of sanity. In Atmospheric Disturbances it wasn’t so immediately clear to me, largely because the protagonist is a psychiatrist, which throws the expectation onto other characters. But the longer I’m in his first person head, the more he insists that this person in his wife’s place is her doppelganger, the more I believe that he is the deluded one. I haven’t yet finished either. Both are published by FSG.

What I find disturbing in the Galchen novel is that the structure follows outline form: I. a. b. etc. So far, I see no metpahor emerging and it bothers me. It feels gimicky and I’m not sure what I’m getting from it. I haven’t finished the novel, yet, as I said, but I need to say that now, in process, I’m wondering why and not getting an answer. Also, I don’t sense much forward progress and am getting weary of circling around the same material. He believes his wife has a doppelganger; he has a client who believes he is a secret agent for a meteorological society; and his wife has convinced him that he should pretend to be another secret agent in order to treat the client, which he is doing (Why? She is younger than he, and it seems to be some fear of losing her.) but believes to be unethical. So, yes, I get the set-up. He is living two lives and projecting them onto her. But how does this justify the outline structure?

I just don’t know. The squirrels are enjoying themselves.

Posted in reading, writing | 4 Comments

Regarding Lieserl

Posted on 26. August 2010 by Nancy Pinard

Despite having the highest grades in his graduating class at the Zurich Polytechnic, Einstein was unable to find a job after graduation. It was understood that such a student would become the assistant to one of the professors there, but thanks to Einstein’s having failed to attend class and an impudence that came off as arrogant, even the professors who had originally recognized and reveled in his peculiar genius refused to hire him. Eventually he suspected them of sabotaging his efforts to get work elsewhere. At last his friend Grossman was able to secure him a position in the patent office in Bern. He abandoned a student he had been tutoring and moved to Bern in January 1902. (Is this a pattern?)

Meanwhile, his relationship with a Serbian classmate, Mileva Maric, a woman nearly his equal in her passion for physics, had grown to the point of sexual intimacy. She became pregnant and returned to her home in Novi Sad, to her family, to wait out the pregnancy. The child, Lieserl, remained unknown to Einstein scholars until the publication of letters found in the safety deposit box of Einstein’s son, Hans Albert’s second wife. Hans’ first wife had cleaned out Mileva Maric’s Zurich apartment on her death in 1948. Voila.

Mileva eventually became Einstein’s wife and they had two sons together, both recognized, but this little girl Lieserl–? She was delivered at Mileva’s parents’ home in Novi Sada labor so difficult that she was unable to write to Einstein, so her father notified him.

Is she healthy, and does she cry properly? Einstein wrote back. What are her eyes like? Which one of us does she more resemble? Who is giving her milk? Is she hungry? She must be completely bald. I love her so much and don’t even know her yet? Yet this love did not inspire him to make the train trip to visit her, and when Mileva turned up later to be married, she did not bring Lieserl. No one knew of this baby’s existence until the letters turned up in 1986.

What became of the baby? This remains a mystery, despite the efforts of Michele Zackheim, author of Einstein’s Daughter, a memoir Zackheim’s journey to uncover her whereabouts. Several theories seem likely. Lieserl may have been sent to Maric’s close friend, Helene Kaufler Savic, who had lived in the same rooming house in Zurich. A Viennese Jew, Savic married an engineer from Serbia and Mileva encouraged Einstein to write to her occasionally. We must treat her very nicely. She’ll have to help us in something important, after all. (Isaacson, p. 77) Whether this adoption ever took place was impossible for Zackheim to determine, thanks to poorly kept records of births and baptisms complicated by wars destroying the records that were kept. One theory suggests that Lieserl was a monstrosity and hidden away at Maric’s parents’ farm. Another that she died at two-years-old, of scarlet fever. Whatever happened, she seems to have vanished to history.

So, what to do with this? If the story frames itself later in the life of the principals, these could be flashbacks. Or, I can imagine the scene told from Maric’s father’s POV. The Maric parents had received a hostile letter from Einstein’s mother, as she opposed the marriage. Imagine receiving a letter from the mother of your daughter’s fiance, deriding your daughter? What would become of that letter when your daughter turned up at home, pregnant with a child whose father couldn’t be bothered to come visit? This would involve researching Maric’s parentsSerbs who were somewhat wealthy by the standard of the day and regionwealthy enough to send their brilliant daughter to college in an era when women were not educated. Mileva was the only woman in Einstein’s class.

Posted in Einstein, Einstein's children, Mileva Maric | 3 Comments

Acedia and Me, too

Posted on 22. August 2010 by Nancy Pinard

I’ve been reading Acedia by Kathleen Norris, a book about slothboth words so seldom used the computer software underlines them in red, as if each is a misspelling of some valid word. Called the Noonday Demon by the Desert Fathers, our having no word for it doesn’t mean it does not beset us, and particularly solitary people like writers. Norris says it feels like depression, but is not depression. Depression is marked by a desire we have no power to act upon, whereas acedia/sloth is when we have the power to act but feel no desire to do so. It is desirelessness, acedia, and may take such forms as losing oneself for hours in activities of no merit such as staring at television. Norris describes spending days consuming utterly forgettable novels, the mental equivalent of potato chips, books that have no potential to enlighten, edify, or feed her own work, let alone her soul.

Here’s what Cassian of Marseilles, one of the Desert Fathers quoted by Norris, has to say about acedia:

Our sixth contending is with that which the Greeks call Accidie, and which we may describe as tedium or perturbation of heart. It is akin to dejection and especially felt by wandering monks and solitaries, a persistent and obnoxious enemy to such as dwell in the desert, disturbing the monk especially about midday, like a fever mounting at a regular time . . . And so some of the Fathers declare it to be the demon of noontide which is spoken of in the XCth Psalm.

When this besieges the unhappy mind, it begets aversion from the place, boredom with one’s cell, and scorn and contempt for one’s brethren, whether they be dwelling with one or some way off, as careless and unspiritually minded persons. Also, toward any work that may be done within the enclosure of own lair, we become listless and inert. It will not suffer us to stay in our cell, or to attend to our reading: we lament that in all this while, living in the same spot, we have made no progress, we sigh and complain that bereft of sympathetic fellowship we have no spiritual fruit; and bewail ourselves as empty of all spiritual profit, abiding vacant and useless in this place; and we that could guide others and be of value to multitudes have edified no man, enriched no man with our precept and example.

Sound familiar?

Posted in writing | 4 Comments

A possible frame for the Einstein novel

Posted on 9. August 2010 by Nancy Pinard

Today I read an article on Einstein that might provide a possible frame for the next book. I’m not far enough in to say for certain, but the article presents a possibility. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1211594-7,00.html

The materials seem to be there, in print, translated and available, for me to do this without learning Hebrew and moving to Jerusalem to live in a library. My fear is that the conflict–the race against a competitor to produce the theory–is too like Darwin’s threat from Alfred Russel Wallace. The question becomes, is this kind of competition what makes scientists commit their notions to print? Of course, the divorce scenerio and Einstein’s first wife’s antagonism is very different from the Darwin marriage. The pain of the his son, Hans Albert, in the article is very touching.

POV might be the solution to the similarities. Not sure. I need to read more– to find the similarity and resonance with my own life with some character in this drama. At some point I’ll have words in my head. I haven’t given up on my interest in exploring the question of his abandoning the son who was mentally ill–on the grounds that genius has its own demands and minding the infirm is not one of them. The second son, Tete in the article, was schizophrenic. His first wife, Mileva, beggered herself to take care of him. Einstein, by then, was married to his cousin, Elsa Einstein, but he never stepped in to help–after the original Nobel Prize money he gave Mileva in the divorce settlement–for which she had to wait something like 14 years. He became very wealthy but never revisited his obligation to his ex-wife/son.

Posted in Darwin, Einstein, Einstein's children, family members, Mileva Maric, writing | 6 Comments