
Tensions came from home and stress came from work to Einstein... especially during his most vulnerable times. At Time.com today, Walter Isaacson’s The Intimate Life of A. Einstein, stated, “In 1915, Albert Einstein was struggling to wrest from nature what would turn out to be his crowning achievement, perhaps the most beautiful theory in all of science. Ten years earlier, he had come up with the special theory of relativity, which said that time and space were each relative for observers moving at different constant velocities. Now he was trying to generalize the theory by conceiving of gravity as a curving of the fabric of something he called space-time.”
At the same time Einstein’s marriage to Mileva Maric, a complex physicist from , broke down completely. When she left so did his sons Hans, 11, and Eduard, 5. Unwell, Einstein was cared for by his cousin, Elsa Einstein, whom he later married.
Isaacson pointed out that... “His letters, including some made public this week, show how his personal and scientific struggles intertwined in 1915, culminating in his great triumph that fall.” Letters written in early April by his son Hans, “begged his father to visit him and his brother in
Because of the war which prevented any visits, Einstein promised his oldest son that he’d visit in July to hike with him in the Swiss Alps. "In the summer I will take a trip with just you alone," he wrote. "This will happen every year, and Tete may also come along when he is old enough for it." He expressed delight that his son had taken a liking to geometry. It had been his "favorite pastime" when he was about the same age, he said, "but I had no one to demonstrate anything to me, so I had to learn it from books."
Eventually as tension grew harsher between the two parents, Einstein’s son wrote what he surmised had been dictated by her, that he would not be able to see his father. Personal tensions grew across the same space and time Einstein sought to solve for others ... as father and sons longed to be together and found themselves apart. Have you found that the tensions of work can break ties at home and tensions at home can break concentration at work?