Aktuality

From Collaboration to Oblivion: The tragedy of Mileva Marić Einstein

Mileva Marić with her husband, Albert Einstein

Presentation given by Pauline Gagnon at the Physics Department, Charles University

What if Einstein's 1905 "miracle year" wasn't a solo achievement? Letters and biographical evidence reveal that Mileva Marić - Einstein's first wife and fellow physicist—was far more than a supportive spouse. She was his intellectual equal, his study partner, and his collaborator on some of his most famous work.

This talk examines the documented evidence of their partnership, placed in its personal and historical context. Through facts rather than speculation, we'll explore why this talented physicist has been largely erased from history—and what her story reveals about how we remember scientific achievement.

When: Wednesday, March 11 at 4 pm

Where: Lecture hall T1, Troja campus of the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University, V Holešovičkách 2

How to get there: Bus no. 201 stop Kuchyňka , or no. 187 stop Pelc Tyrolka

Born in Quebec, Canada in 1955, Pauline Gagnon completed a PhD in particle physics at the University of California in Santa Cruz in 1993 then conducted research at CERN, the largest physics laboratory in the world until she retired in 2014 after participating in the Higgs boson discovery and the search for dark matter. In 2015, Oxford University Press released her popular science book: Who cares about particle physics? Making sense of the Higgs boson, the Large Hadron Collider and CERN, which has been published in seven other languages. Over the past decade, she has given more than two hundred public talks worldwide both to physicists and general audiences not only on particle physics but also on diversity issues in science and telling the story of Mileva Marić Einstein. She now lives in Germany.