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"ABC Television" Australia Link: www.abc.net.au/tv/guide/netw/200404/highlights/226004.htm
9:30pm Wednesday, 21 April E = mc 2 the most powerful and eloquent equation in the world of physics. And possibly the number one reason we still revere Albert Einstein today. But was it all his own work? Einstein's Wife is the story of a pioneering female mathematician whose footnote in science history is not so much forgotten, as it is buried. Her fatal flaw, to become the lover and then the wife of the soon-to-be world's favourite genius. In 1896 Mileva Maric, a courageous young woman of exceptional intellect, boldly entered the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and enrolled in theoretical physics. Only one other person did the same, a young Albert Einstein. Not only did Mileva share Albert's passions, she cooked his meals, raised his children, corrected his calculations, translated his texts and drafted his lecture notes. Then that magical equation was published and almost overnight Mileva became invisible. Writer/Producer Geraldine Hilton has researched Mileva Maric's story for 10 years. She has used extraordinary primary source material as well as the remarkable contents of a recently unearthed cache of love letters containing astounding references to their research together. Einstein's Wife is a story of love, marriage, science and sexual discrimination and restores the memory of a remarkable woman of the 20th century, driven by passion, but drowned by history. Production Details A Melsa Films Production written and produced by Geraldine Hilton; Executive Producer Paul Humfress; Director Nicola Woolmington. Executive Producer for ABC TV, Stefan Moore. Patrizia Reimer (original
text in PDF) Albert Einstein was a genius, there is little debate about that but could it be he had some help along the way, some unacknowledged inspiration that only years after his death the world was prepared to reveal? According to local producer Geraldine Hilton he had much more than a little help, he had a ‘silenced’ partner, a woman, help him form his most lauded scientific discovery, the theory of relativity. Ms Hilton and her Bangalow production company Melsa Films are creating a stir in the worldwide scientific community with a documentary, Einstein’s Wife, which explores Mileva Maric’s role as both wife and scientist. The film has aired twice on America’s respected public broadcasting channel PBS breaking ratings records in its first run in November last year. The network has also nominated the film for the 2004 Emmy Awards.The first documentary for Ms Hilton which took seven years to research will have its Australian premiere this week on the ABC. She was inspired to look into the mysterious first wife of Einstein after a series of previously hidden love letters were published in newspapers in the early 90s. When she began her research shortly afterwards she found the lack of available material stifling and was also thwarted by the Einstein apologists as she called them, die-hard supporters who wanted to maintain the man’s mystique. Many of these were to be found at the Princeton Centre for Einstein Study which held most of Einstein’s archived papers. ‘I had to keep working and earning a living and at that stage there was only one book that had been written about Mileva Maric and it was written in Serbia with no translation,’ said Ms Hilton. ‘I had to wait seven years until people like those at the Princeton Centre for Einstein Study started to publish more of the books relevant to the period I was studying. I needed the distance of a decade for them to come down,’ she said. Mileva and Einstein got married in 1903 and divorced 16 years later. In 1909 Einstein began an affair with his first cousin Elsa and left Mileva in 1913 to be with his lover. Einstein’s autobiography makes no mention of his first wife and it seems his love life was full of secrecy and controversy, perhaps just like his scientific achievements. The letters between Mileva and Einstein, kept secret for many years until 1987 when they were first released, were significant because Mileva refers constantly in them to ‘our work’. Shortly after in 1905 the genesis of the theory of relativity took shape. She has since been described as Einstein’s scientific collaborator. In researching the mysterious Mileva Ms Hilton travelled to the United States, Germany, Slovenia, Switzerland and was in Yugoslavia during the Serb-Croat war. Here she and the cameraman aroused suspicion and were detained for questioning by leather-jacketed men in a smoky jail. The greatest difficulty in the research however was a fear by Einstein supporters that his name would be tainted but Ms Hilton and her female researcher overcame that by playing on that Aussie laissez-faire attitude that people mistook for harmlessness or ineptitude. ‘“She’s just an Aussie director, what would she know”, is what they’d think, we’d act dumb, we’re just a couple of Aussie chicks and they’d think, “what would they know”,’ said Ms Hilton. But it seems one should never underestimate the capabilities of a woman or two. Einstein’s Wife screens
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Untold Stories: Einstein's Wife
