Einstein's list of conditions for staying together with his wife
listsofnote.com
listsofnote.com
Don't judge a man until you've walked a mile in his shoes. And keep in mind that we're looking at all this from almost a century later and that society has moved on quite a bit. Things that my grandparents would have considered perfectly a-ok would look ridiculous to you and me. Context is everything.
In plenty of places in the world this would be an 'amicable arrangement' even today.
Mote, beam, eye etc.
Without knowing what went on before this it is very hard to judge the list. Maybe they reached a stage of armistice and decided to live like this for the sake of their kids. Whatever it was, it spells out tragedy rather than malice.
Don't know how many people have been married a long time here (i.e. > 10 years). Looking at the responses, it seems to me not that many.
Thankfully, my marriage is several orders better than his was. But still I can perhaps see where the conditions are coming from.
Just to take an example - C(3) - you will leave my bedroom or study immediately without protest if I request it.
I can see that for whatever reasons any fights between a husband (who works from home) and wife start when the husband is nicely all set to begin the day's work. It may be over a trivia discussion (perhaps because the husband has some work related frustration) or it could be the result of something building up. Now as a husband who is working from home, does not even have the choice to go to work elsewhere, in such a situation. And the argument/discussion/fight won't end until one person leaves the place. And countless hours can get lost, for a trivia thing.
The fact that we're often not aware of it doesn't change the reality.
When it comes to other people's relationships, the one thing you can be absolutely sure of is that you don't really understand them.
So I think the important thing to understand when reading this is that we have zero context - and perhaps worse because all we know are Einstein's works.
If my girlfriend did not work, I would ask her to take care of all the chores and meals (which would probably be, at most, 20 hours a week of work). Accordingly, I do not see items A[1-3] on the list as unreasonable, given his wife was not employed at this period in their life. I also happen to be very particular about my desk area, given I spend most of my sorry life in front of it. :)
Einstein wanted to stay together for the sake of his children, but had clearly fallen out of love with his wife. If you had a lot of work to do, you probably would not want to be bothered with socializing with a person you no longer loved. He gave her the best options he could - even after she left him, he paid her half his salary and gave her his Nobel Prize money (which was enough to buy three houses, among other things), even though this was not legally required.
Mostly, this just seems like a list by a man who wants to be left alone so he can work, not a bad person.
"If my girlfriend did not work" is a shorthand for something else. I think it's shorthand for "sit around being lazy all day", which is an emotional decision and not the overt economical one. If your girlfriend is going to school full-time, then that's not work. Would you expect her to put in up to 20 hours of chores and meals on top of her studies? I don't think so.
Ahh, but perhaps you also meant to include potentially income-generating work (like studies) along with income-generating work?
Which then means that if your girlfriend gets disability pay then she doesn't have to do as many chores, right? Since even if she watches the TV all day she's still bringing in some money, as a consequence of work she's already done. (This can be extended to living off of a trust fund, or off royalty income.)
If you had children then would she also need to spend 100% of her time raising the children, on top of the chores? At what point do you start helping? Can you assign a monetary value on that?
Or, if you were making $1 million per year, then would you still request that she do all of the chores and meals? Because then it feels petty, when you could easily hire others to do it instead, and she can pursue her life's dream of developing free online education courses.
In the modern context, the delegation of chores is based on a combination of factors, including available time, interest in doing so, and tolerance of what happens when it isn't done. If you don't like it and can't deal with it, then you break up. In the modern context, breaking up or even getting a divorce is a simple task with little social stigma. Hence you have very little power over your girlfriend. If you "ask her to take care of all the chores and meals" then she can say "no", and leave.
100 years ago there was a much higher power imbalance. The woman couldn't easily say "no" and leave, even if the demands of the man were unreasonable, because it was much harder for her to have a normal life post-separation than for him.
In any case, simply saying "if my girlfriend did not work" is belittling because it assumes that work is the only thing that's important in a relationship, and it's secondarily gender biased because men tend to have higher incomes than women.
Therefore, I do not think it's proper to reduce the issue to a trade-off between working vs. doing more chores, because that provide no insight into the underlying complications of a relationship.
I gave some clear counter-examples for why that simple viewpoint may not be reasonable: non-work based income (e.g., disability pay or trust fund), going to school, or simply that the other person is making enough money that they can easily hire people to do the work. My wife, btw, gets disability from the Army and is going to school full-time, so I can easily relate here.
I can give more examples. Suppose the wife has a take-home pay of $45K and the husband wants to be a concert pianist, but there are no jobs open in the area. So the husband practices 6+ hours a day (in the expectation of a job for the future). Is that non-paying practice "working"? What if that husband also does occasional piano lessons at $15/hour, bringing in $150/week? Are chores now exempt because there is some paying work?
Let's say that the wife has a take-home pay of $88K, which is easily enough to support a couple, only the wife wants a larger house while the husband wants to volunteer full-time at the local animal shelter. The wife could demand that since she brings home the family income then he should do more chores around the house. In that way they wouldn't have to pay the house cleaner to come in, pay for laundry services, nor buy as much take-out, and so save up in order to buy a bigger house (which the husband would then need to clean). That she can demand such is clear.
But it's also clear that the underlying issue here isn't "doing chores" vs. "bringing home the bacon." So saying that "If my girlfriend did not work, I would ask her to take care of all the chores and meals" is a uselessly simple statement. And I don't even think it's true for you or for the original poster.
Suppose you become seriously ill and can't work for a year. Your wife gets a job, while you're unable to do all but the most basic of chores at home. Would your inability to do the rest of the chores be sufficient justification for your wife to divorce you? I didn't think so. Though in truth, it is stressful and quite a few marriages don't survive this sort of incident, I don't think the main reason is that one person couldn't do all of the chores while the other works.
Since we have no reason to believe that the poster was rich enough to hire somebody to do all the chores and that neither him nor his spouse had a disability that would prevent them from performing chores we can assume that he simply meant "if she would otherwise be idle I would expect her to help with chores".
You complain about hypotheticals. This whole tangent started with the hypothetical "if she would otherwise be idle" so it isn't like I started it. But you'll see that I also gave a non-hypothetical. My wife doesn't work. I do. She goes to school full-time and gets disability money from the army. Should she do all of the household chores because I'm the one who is earning the money? Maybe. If she wants to. But it's not predicated on that I'm the one making the money and she isn't.
The disagreement between me and others here seems to be because there are two issues at play: one is the personal view of the commenter, regarding what that commenter expects from a relationship, and the other the extension of that view to others.
The former I find somewhat crude and distasteful but acceptable because breaking up or getting a divorce has much less of a stigma than 100 years ago. It's the expansion of that view as a generally acceptable cultural goal or justification that I'm complaining about.
I mentioned "chores will be distributed inversely proportional to % of household income provided" as an example how the commenter's view is not a useful guideline. The view is absolute: if the girlfriend doesn't work then she should spend not more than 20 hours a week doing chores. My question - meant to highlight the useless of that guideline - is: if the girlfriend works for 1 hour a month, does that mean she doesn't need to do any chores? Almost certainly not. But the guideline says nothing about how to handle that case, which means it's a rather overly specific guideline.
(Now excuse me. I need to put the next load of wash on the line. It's my turn to do laundry. :) )
I don't think the original comment said anything along the lines of "here is an equation that everyone needs to apply in order to decide who does the dishes".
Just that if you have a situation where one person has significantly more free time than the other it wouldn't seem unreasonable to expect them to do more chores. Of course in real life there can always extra variables that complicate things. These things usually manifest themselves as domestic arguments, so are best discussed up front.
Respectfully (!), your conclusion relies on a fallacy (perhaps more than one type). This type of fallacy is called an "argument from silence", in which you make an assumption based on a lack of information provided:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_silence
In other words, without knowing all the details of my life (or Einstein's) you can not really conclude our motives, outlook on sexism, etc.
On the other hand, the list is perfect to figure out what had happened before: their home was a mess, meals were spotty, there were frequent discussions that prevented him from work and she belittled him in front of their children.
That's not to say that the situation was her fault.
I had a relationship once where (and this is my perhaps incorrect, post hoc attempt at understanding what happened) my girlfriend didn't want to be the one who broke up, so she made more and more demands on me until finally I had enough. The demands in the list could be indicative of that sort of behavior, and not a true description of the situation.
Einstein was human. The purpose of using the phrases "womanizer" and "demanding jerk" was emotional -- we think of our heroes in pure terms. To associate them with negative judgmental phrases (such that we might easily use with anybody else in the world we meet) causes us distress.
And from what I understand, Einstein chased women all his life, even during his second marriage. How he and his second wife got along with this is anybody's guess.
But to focus on Einstein or his faults (or my easy judgement of him) is to miss the point. We read this list and we feel disjointed -- cognitive dissonance. How can such a great man speak like this to one who loves him? The reaction shouldn't be to start naval-gazing at our on judgment of others. The reaction should be to realize that we have only a very simple and cartoonish view of the world. People who did a lot of good in the world had some really big flaws. People who did a lot of evil in the world had redeeming qualities. If we really want to understand these folks, we need to see them in their own terms, not how mass media portrays them.
Perhaps some folks want to canonize some and demonize others. I much prefer to live in a world full of folks just like me -- human. The more I start glossing over faults? The more I'm missing out on all the good parts of history.
Look. Einstein was a womanizer. Galileo was a bit of a jerk. Newton was unhealthily obsesses with numbers. Martin Luther King Jr also chased women. Hell Nash was officially certifiable. If the only thing you get out of all my statements is that I'm judgmental, you're missing the point. Worse yet your'e missing all the good stuff, the parts of history people don't talk about. I'm not saying these men are bad; I'm saying they're just like the rest of us.
The private affairs between two people are best left alone unless you get an active invitation from both participants to state what you think, and even then you're going to have to work really hard to figure out what an objective viewpoint would be. Judging is easy, deciding when explicitly not to judge is a lot harder.
And I wasn't judging you either ;)
But I'm not trying to slander the man, I'm trying to understand him.
When I was a kid I used to be interested in General Patton of WWII. After a long spell of hero worship, I came to know more and more about the man. Finally I had an epiphany: he was really an asshole. Men who were under his command would have shot him. Many times. The people he reported to could barely manage him. He was an arrogant, self-centered, SOB.
But that didn't make Patton bad. That made Patton interesting. Yes, he was a son of a bitch, but damnit, he was our son of a bitch. :)
You may have to simply live with not being able to. Both because of a lack of cultural connection and because you weren't there when it happened.
Getting a little deep for me early on a Tuesday morning, jacques. If your name really is jacques (which I can't be sure of) :)
I think you can actually understand others, but you're going to have to interact (like we do right here) with those people that you wish to understand.
Trying to understand people that have been dead for quite a while from (very terse) writings made in a stressful situation almost a century old is a very difficult undertaking. The lack of access to the subject, the distortion of social mores over time and more things like that make this from a practical point of view very hard.
At best this will give you fractional insights into aspects of their character it will never allow you to say 'x is a jerk' or anything to that effect. There would have to be significant qualification of that statement.
No, we can never really know any historical figure or event. The most we can do is try to learn what we can and hope that it has an emotional impact on us. If you really want a historical person to have the most influence possible in your life, you should strive to learn both the good and bad things about them -- not in terms of dates and facts, but in terms of how they thought about things.
Reading about historical figures should be an emotional experience. You should try to empathize and feel the things they felt. This is, of necessity going to cause you some discomfort as well.
Not only is it possible to say "X is a jerk", but it is necessary. Otherwise people from the past are just little cardboard cutouts in a sea of data. Fan of Plato? Then you should not only know his works, you should have a personal feeling of how you view the way he thinks about things. Yes, this is imaginary, but it's also necessary. History is not just a list of famous guys doing things on certain dates. It's something you, personally, should use your imagination to dive into and enjoy.
History is fun. People are complex. We use our imagination and comprehension and passion to drive us towards better understanding of historical figures and their actions. This is the good part.
I'll bow out. Seems like you are making some other kind of point about really knowing what's in the heart of others and judging those we may never culturally understand. That really has nothing to do with anything. I say grab onto somebody in history you admire and dive deep into their personal and emotional life. Make your own judgments, ask yourself how you would have acted in similar circumstances. Learn and respect both the good and the bad. Have passion.
Thanks for the chat!
the context in which you interact with someone changes how you know that person
the same person (everyone, you included) will seem like a different person based on whether they are interacting with a collegue, a supervisor, an underling, an employee at McDonalds, a waiter at a fancy restaurant, an old friend, a stranger, a child, a parent etc. etc.
alot of the people you view favorably, you probably do so because the context of your relationship is mutual respect, those people probably have relationships that aren't in those context, and the people in them probably have quite different views of those people.
if "knowing" a person is actually possible, it might be easier to do so from the prospective of 100 years of distance and a biography than from the extreme closeup of personal interaction
It would be a mistake to use this one letter to judge this one man through the lens of our times, which is what I think you're objecting to. Certainly that's not good history. But viewed within the context of the other things we know about him, it is much more revealing, and an interesting counterpoint to the hero/villain-narrative we reflexively grant famous people.
You make it sound like some mysterious quantum dynamics problem.
There is _already_ plenty of context for making a judgement call in this case. It's not like they lived in another galaxy, in a society with extremely different cultural norms.
We know the norms of the era they lived, we have other people as examples from that time, and we even know (or have known) people that were alive back then. It's not like we're missing some mysterious information that changes all this into something else.
We're not talking about Andromeda. This is planet earth, a western society, a highly educated man, less than a century ago.
Heck, those of us who know History, we can make judgement calls even for millennia before.
And those misunderstandings go unresolved, in spite of both parties trying hard.
Read it as a "roommate agreement" of a sort.
There's your problem. You are supposing the existence of a feeling where it was probably another, probably opposite, feeling.
All your rant is based on a probably false premise.
They're all interrelated though, so it gets complicated rather quickly. But yes: Serbs are proud to be Serbs.
1) It is a immigrant thing. When you feel that you are being identified as the "other" you get the urge to preemptively "come out of the closet" as an immigrant in a show of good will towards your native hosts and try to fit in. It's a way of saying "Hey guys, I know I am this scary foreigner, but really I'm just like you so can we be friends?" I've experienced this with people of many other nationalities and ethnicities where the conversation will inevitably turn into them telling me about their country of origin.. which I don't mind since I enjoy learning about different cultures.
2) Maybe you encounter a disproportionate number of Serbian people in your daily life so point #1 is magnified, or perhaps because of your own background or personal reasons you are overly sensitive to the idea of Serbian identity.
3) Serbs do tend to be sensitive about their ethnic identity because many of us feel that we have been misrepresented and not entirely fairly villainized in the media, while at the same time also being victims of long standing ethnic hatred in our native countries, so insecurity borne out of that treatment motivates an exaggerated sense of nationalism in some of us.
Hopefully one of those, or a combination of them, explains why "Serbs are always pointing out their nationality".
If you're from a place that doesn't get a lot of international press, it's natural to feel pride when a person from that place is met with acclaim. My high school teachers probably still talk about the fact that most of them also taught a writer for The Simpsons.
It must be quite lonely being so unique as Einstein. Most people have a hard enough time finding someone who they can relate to. When you're as publicly distinguished as he was I imagine finding someone to relate to must've felt entirely hopeless. Particularly since she was a bright woman, and 'on paper' should've been a good match and now it wasn't working out.
Einstein's second marriage was with his cousin which could be seen as more evidence of his desire to be able to relate to someone. Having family history probably helped them feel close, and he probably gave up on someone being able to relate to his intellectual pursuits by that time.
Unfortunately I don't have any hard evidence to point to support my ideas. I have been thinking of this since Steve Jobs died and have been wondering how such unique people like him, Einstein, and others dealt with not being able to feel true connection with another human being.
Sometimes I think we give the impression that having "vision" is like some innate quality a person has, and not the result of intense effort over a long period of time, which is what it actually is.
Just goes to show that there is usually a huge difference between what we think of historical figures and how they actually were.
It's interesting how much we want our heroes to be pure and spotless -- unlike any other humans we encounter.
It shows that people are complicated and multifaceted. While we have a tendency to either laud or vilify figures (with nothing in between), in reality, historical figures can be both "good" and "bad" in different aspects of their lives... just like the rest of us.
My favorite example of this is Helen Keller[1]. Almost nobody these days knows anything about Helen Keller beyond the age of 18 - they know that learned to communicate despite being deaf and blind, but the nearly 70 years of her life after that are almost buried in history.
Which is a shame, because Helen Keller would have been a notable figure in her own right even if it weren't for her disability[2].
But because she was a member of the official Socialist party, we can't use her story as an inspirational lesson and mention that she held political beliefs that we may or may not agree with. Instead have to make a judgement call as to whether her "good" or her "bad[3]" side is more important to teach, and then forget about the rest.
Worse, this principle is applied in reverse to dehumanize people whom history has classified as villains. The result is that our history is filled with monochromatic caricatures, and we forget that, were we to see the complete picture, our modern-day "villains" may not look so different (for better or for worse!)
[1] I believe Loewen talks about this in his excellent book Lies My Teacher Told Me (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies_My_Teacher_Told_Me)
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Keller#Political_activiti...
[2] Naturally, this presumes that you either disagree with socialist politics or think that history lessons should be politically neutral, which is the predominant belief in the USA.
Now when I write that, does our welcoming of his great contributions need to make us guilty of also endorsing morals we perceive behind this "list of demands" he made of his wife?
And then with various permutations for the child being yours or a stranger and/or the people on the right being your parents and / or strangers.
We are not well equipped to make such decisions.
We just don't have a socially accepted notion of "scientific monkhood" yet I suppose.
Perhaps not monkhood, but as an eccentric removing himself from society is a common occurrence. And for sufficiently levels of ability and talent, people are willing to forgo social convention.
I forget who it was, but one of the great ones long gone was extremely uncomfortable around people. To the extent that people were told that they should casually walk up to him, and without addressing him directly, talk to the air about the problem they were facing or had come up with.
If it's my child or someone I know, save him/her.
If they are all strangers, save the greater number.
If I know both the child and one or more people among the set of 3, prioritize based on genetic or family proximity.
The point is, this can be solved algorithmically and/or game theoretically.
But it would be interesting to run the experiment in a psychology lab and see what kind of results arise.
It wouldn't be the first time in the history of science that one man was recognized for something just because he was louder in self promotion (see Tesla vs Edison).
I don't claim that Mileva Marić is of Tesla caliber, but treating woman that is as educated as her husband, and who also participated and contributed highly in his early work as a mere home service says a lot about person doing it.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mileva_Mari%C4%87#Role_in_physi...
History has a way of attributing contributions to the foremost scientist of the era. For example, "Newtonian" physics implies and is often taught to have all been first discribed by Newton, when in reality it was a joint effort of him, Galileo, Kepler, Descarte, Hooke, Leibniz, and others.
Cultivated men are still jerks today, as a general rule. It's just that we are too blind to see (just like Einstein was in his day) that. Give it until 2110 to tell you just how much.
In 1914 it was totally normal for women not to have the vote, not to have a say in the family finances and to be given consideration only after the sons in the family (but before the daughters). They were not considered capable of higher education (exceptions allowed, sometimes these dressed as men to get around the limitations) and so on.
Cultivated men made those rules and whole pile of others, and decades of erosion by activists and others have restored the balance. Partially. Einstein was - as far as I can see here - not much different than what I know about how life was back then in general. Plenty of his peers would have done much worse than this, and only an extremely small (vanishingly small maybe) portion of society would have done much better.
The fact that we have Einstein on a pedestal today does not mean that (a) he wasn't human and hence bound to make mistakes and (b) that he wasn't a product of his time.
Same with women, and we'll have to wait just as long to see it.
Extraordinary claim. What evidence do you have for this one?
My eyes.
I must have missed it.
I really have no idea, but I think it's pretty unfair to make character judgements from a single note out of context. Human relationships are complex.
If you want to counter the argument, present contrary evidence.
I think the down votes are a little harsh.
She wanted him to stay for the kids and continue to provide for the family. In return, he wanted some help around the house and to ensure emotional disconnect from the relationship that was already dead by this point. I expect couples today would form similar arrangements in the same situation.
I don't know if Einstein's marriage was similar to mine. Maybe he was a demanding jerk, but the possibility does exist that he was reacting to the circumstances he found himself in.
If that seems too daunting, order The Emotionally Abusive Relationship by Beverly Engel or get it out of the library. It's a good starting point and in general books written by therapists are a great complement to therapy.
http://www.amazon.com/Emotionally-Abusive-Relationship-Abuse...
If not for yourself, do this for your children, who suffer as much as you - if only because you and your wife are so important to them - but are helpless to change the situation.
You don't need to be qualified as a mental health professional to recommend psychotherapy. If a man here complained of symptoms that made it sound like he was having a heart attack, we'd all tell him to go see a doctor, and to me this is no different.
And although the wife may need a psychiatrist and medication (I assume this is what "treatment" means), I was writing to the husband here who in my non-professional opinion needs help of his own, simply by virtue of being in the relationship with her. And for this talk therapy may be enough. (Obviously patience and luck are nice.)
As someone who has some experience here (on the past kid side), results from professional help come slowly if at all, and especially if there are kids involved, drastic hard choices need to be made that we shouldn't talk about here.
The best advice I would give here is preventative: carefully evaluate the mental health of your potential partner, including their family history, you really don't want any surprises later even if you are OK with it. This is in addition to checking for lifestyle compatibility; e.g. if you are a scientist obsessed with your work, make sure your potential partner is really really OK with that. And do you require extreme order in your life to function effectively (e.g. some autism)? Ya, that is something you also need to take up with your partner.
And if the emotional issue involves, providing the domestic service will not guarantee that she will satisfy with what you did for her. She may complain about other things.
Some people, not necessary has mental issue, will never appreciate what they already have because they always desire to what they do not have right now. They never feel satisfaction.
no appreciation no satisfaction in those people's heart
Sounds familiar. I wonder if her family would rethink their position when they had to suffer her.
Just a little fact: unless you divorce soon, you'll develop some mental symptons yourself, if you hadn't already. And don't be fooled: you're not making any favor to your children staying.
If I can be of any help, my email is in my profile.
You'll need sufficient proof for that. Not just "heard".
Looks like he was a demanding jerk as well.
Really? Asking for 3 meals a day and laundry? Maybe he's the one responsible for paying all the bills. Don't read half the story.
Also, I think their relationship is broken already, they were just keeping an "MVP" for the children.
You will undertake not to belittle me in front of our children, either through words or behavior.
That could also tell that the wife is not that innocent too.
Here are some quick links I turned up on the exhibit:
http://eastpdxnews.com/general-news-features/explore-space-a...
http://www.flickr.com/groups/alberteinstein/pool/tags/omsi/
The Flickr link has a bunch of photos of the documents, but I don't none of them are labelled, so it may be a bit time-consuming to search for anything specific.
That people cope with emotional abuse in different ways does not justify emotional abuse. As plenty of people mentioned in the thread, this was a different time when women had less possibilities and support systems for themselves.
These are, most likely, the issues that lead to the demise of the relationship in the first place. It is the only way their living arrangement would be able to continue at all.
I was saying that because someone agreed to a set of conditions, it doesn't make the conditions necessarily okay or reasonable.
I don't really understand the fuss. At the time it was a normal arrangement in marriage for women to take care of the house. That arrangement in itself is not belittling to women, it is simply division of labor. Household chores are not less worthy than other labor (if you believe they are, see what feminism did, apparently it belittles women even more). The letter says nothing about his wife not being allowed to pursue other options. Even today some people voluntarily choose such arrangements. And it is merely his conditions, she is free to not accept them.
I can't say if that's true or not, but if you combine these symptoms with the state of women's' rights at the time, this really isn't surprising at all - and in any case, there are far more explicit examples of sexism from this period.
-- Whether ironically or obviously ... is harder to tell.
________
[1] eg, no sexual expectations of a colleague (ie, harassment), no disturbing a colleague's work/space, no insulting in public manner (of a colleague in front of clients, etc).
Surprise surprise...
I suspect a lot of this may come from us not being in a position to judge people from almost 100 years by the standards of today.
I could see if their relationship had completely fallen apart by this point, but that they both wanted to stay together even though they were no longer in love, that a couple could come up with ground rules like this.
Who knows what her list of demands for him were?
Requests for lack of intimacy are understandable, given the no love situation. It is strange that the household chores are described - at the time it would be 100% understood that it would be so even if it wasn't written down; apparently it was a problem in their past. I mean, at that time and place, wife not cooking for you would be reasonable grounds for divorce. The "no belittling before our children" is natural as well.
John Calvin had a man burned at the stake. Henry Ford was an anti-semite. 8 of the first 10 US presidents owned slaves. And, no, I don't think it's a matter of shifting standards. Look at Bill Clinton, Martha Stewart, etc.
There's a reason why he moved to America...
He may have been one of the most brilliant minds in the last 100 years, but apparently he had a love life that was just as messed up as the rest of us =)
And that one equation that's easy to remember and sort of understand vaguely.
(Some) folks seem to suggest that since Einstein was working on something as significance as GR, the solitude prioritized over family made sense. If Einstein's work had not succeeded, would the justifications still hold?
Actually... the question on my mind is: every person trying to do something on their own believes in their heart that it is the most important thing, something that will change the world. How far should one take that conviction/belief as justification to forego responsibilities of being a spouse or parent?
A quarrel ending in a door-slam can have damaging effects on the psyche, as a common example that most of you have experienced. It can make it difficult to concentrate.
This just seems to me to be a typical negotiation tool during a relationship gone wrong, trying to prevent further emotional distress. Nothing to see here.
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/08/14/darwin-lis...
F × S = k. The product of Freedom and Security is a constant. To gain more freedom of thought and/or action, you must give up some security, and vice versa. These remarks apply to individuals, nations, and civilizations. Notice that the constant k is different for every civilization and different for every individual.
--Larry NivenAlso since when does staying together in a terrible relationship benefit the children? That is a specious argument at best.
Just kidding, this list is ridiculous and he should have never married if this is what he was expecting.
> " He was right about so much, you have to wonder if he might have been right to list-slap that gal."
you might be correct.
Now that aside, looks like Einstein was human after all. And one full of behavioural defects for that matter. He could've handled that in a much more civilized, and I dare to say, adult way by just having a honest conversation with his wife.
It's very easy to explain your goals, and why you need cooperation from your family to achieve them. If you can't, you have deeper problems than not being able to work properly.
Firstly, I'm right. Down voting what I said doesn't alter the truth embedded within. Unless you change your mind and grow your heart, you're gonna get screwed by a divorce lawyer.
Secondly, it's just a freking integer on my screen, I like better floats! No mater how much that counter gets decremented you're still looking at it from the wrong perspective.