Let's get physical.

Einstein in Love
A Scientific Romance
Dennis Overbye
Viking, $27.95, 416 pp.

Einstein in Love is a sad saga of how love can go tragically wrong, and how being the smartest man on earth (and Time magazine's "Man of the Century") won't save you from traveling down that woeful road.

Dennis Overbye's engaging tale is partly a biography of the young Einstein, partly an exposition of early twentieth-century physics, and--best of all--an account of that mysterious place were heart and mind and flesh tangle in ways that no past, present, or future Einstein will ever unravel. Albert Einstein was the archetypal genius, but he was not smart enough to keep from getting his girlfriend pregnant, from messing up his marriage, and otherwise behaving as a cad to the women in his life.

But the story begins, like all stories, with young people falling in love. The girl was Mileva Maric, delicate, brooding, brilliant, from the "wilds" of eastern Hungary, born with a hip abnormality that caused a lifelong limp. From an early age, she was mathematically precocious and determined to succeed. She was among the first girls to sit beside boys in high school classrooms of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Mileva met Albert at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. She was two years older than the handsome German, and recognized at once the keenness of his mind. Albert too appreciated the darkly sensual girl who rejected bourgeois pretensions and shared his passions for physics and mathematics. "I'm so lucky to have found you," he wrote Mileva in a letter, "a creature who is my equal, and who is as strong and independent as I am!" He called her Dollie; she called him Johnnie. They talked about the fundamental natures of matter, space, and time. They lived on "coffee, music, and physics."

To this reviewer's eye, a photograph of Mileva as a young mother bears a striking resemblance to photographs of Einstein's mother Pauline, who was always a formidable presence in his life (unfortunately, there are no photographs of her in this book). Pauline vehemently opposed her son's relationship with the poor, crippled easterner, perhaps for the same unconscious reason Albert found the girl attractive in the first place.

Albert and Mileva had potentially successful careers before them when in May 1901 Mileva expressed her fear that she might be pregnant. "Don't worry--you are my dear, good sweetheart whatever may happen," wrote Albert. He then moved on to his deeper concern: "I am not very satisfied with my theory of thermoelectricity." The pregnancy ended Mileva's hopes for a career in physics. Her girl child was born in Hungary, was left there when Mileva returned to Switzerland, and soon disappeared to history.

Two years later Albert married Mileva, but by then the bloom was off the rose. He apparently took the leap into matrimony out of a sense of duty. "Mileva had sacrificed her whole life, her honor, her ambition, and her child for him," writes Overbye, and Albert was not without honor. Almost at once, however, the marriage began spiraling downward. Two more children were born of the union, but Albert and Mileva became increasingly estranged. Meanwhile, he was falling in love with his cousin Elsa, who subsequently became his second wife. There were other women too, including Elsa's adult daughter Ilse.

Through all of these domestic tribulations, the physics went on. In 1905 the twenty-six-year-old Einstein published three papers that shook physics to its foundations and won him a reputation as a whiz kid of European physics. One of those papers, titled "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies," has been called the most famous scientific paper in history. It was the beginning of the theories of special and general relativity that Einstein elucidated over the following decade.

What was Mileva's role in the development of the theory of relativity? It is clear that the lovers batted these ideas about during their courtship, and that Mileva checked and rechecked Albert's work during the famous "Einsteinian spring" of 1905. Further, Mileva reportedly told her father early that year, "Not long ago we finished a very significant work that will make my husband world famous." Many historians wonder if that "we" stakes a claim on the authorship of the relativity theory.

Does the petite girl with dark eyes and probing mind deserve to be called the co-author of relativity? Probably not. Overbye presents the available evidence, and it seems clear that Albert was the source of the revolutionary new ideas. Nevertheless, at the end of this disturbing book the reader is ready to raise a modest monument to Mileva, and to give Albert a swift kick in the pants. There is sense in which the women in Einstein's life were certainly instrumental in the genesis of relativity. As mother Pauline and wife Mileva squabbled, Albert wrote: "No wonder that the love of science thrives under these circumstances, for it lifts me impersonally, and without railing and wailing, from the vale of tears into peaceful spheres."

Overbye shows us that Einstein's genius was "to extract the miraculous from thinking--really thinking--about the ordinary." The miracle of relativity--the foundation of all contemporary stories of creation--was rooted in the ordinary, and forged in the heat of a tempestuous love affair. Mileva Maric was muse, lover, math-checker, and ultimately, in Einstein's querulous words, an "unfriendly humorless creature who has nothing from life herself and smothers the joy in life of others through her mere presence."

Albert Einstein won the Nobel Prize for physics in in 1921, and by the terms of their divorce agreement the money went to Mileva. It was all she got for the years of devotion and inspiration. Dennis Overbye is a terrific writer and storyteller. His excellent book may be the monument that Mileva Maric deserves.

Chet Raymo teaches at Stonehill College in Massachusetts, and writes a science column for the Boston Globe. His most recent book is Natural Prayers (Ruminator Books).