But will your local mosque do anything to stop them? If the government starts believing that they actually speak for you, you might find all sorts of nasty, un-Australian things happening.

At what point will the muslims in Australia start putting their money where their mouths are and actually doing something against these misogynists?

1. Rhon, Jennifer (2011) Give Postdocs a Career, Not Empty Promises. Nature 471, 7.

2. Benderly, Beryl L. (July/Aug 2010) The Real Science Gap. It’s not insufficient schooling or a shortage of scientists. It’s a lack of career opportunities. Miller-McCune 3, 4.

Here they are. If you are dead set on doing research, I sure understand. Bite the expense of Kaplan, take the MCAT and get a MD/PhD degree. That way, you will find the license to practice medicine a most useful thing to keep in your back pocket!

For people who so emphatically proclaim their adherence to the scientific method, this seems at variance to their principles. Would we credit, for example, a person’s comments about sexual intercourse if that person had never had sexual intercourse? Or would we be likely to take seriously a writer who claimed to be knowledgeable about playing the piano if the writer had not actually played a piano — and, by the way, had neglected to inform us of this fact? Critics who profess an opinion about Freud but have not been in psychoanalysis deserve the reception we usually save for those who, to use a comparison they seem to love, have had communications with creatures from another planet.

The ETH Record and Grade Transcript for end-of-semester yearly grades is reproduced in the The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, and has the statement: “6 ist die beste, 1 die geringste Note” (vol.1, doc. 28). The relevant Zurich Polytechnic official final diploma examination results for 1900 are reproduced in document 67, which cites the grades for each candidate for each exam taken and the grade average, and states the names of the four who were awarded a diploma, adding that Miss Marić was not.

I’m not sure that there is anything one can usefully add at this stage about these grades, other than that John Stachel reports that he searched the regulations of the Polytechnic and found no statement that grade 5 was required to pass the diploma examinations, as claimed by Senta Troemel-Ploetz (Stachel 2002, p. 32).

Most of German schools (up to taking “points” in the 1980ies) graded 1 – 5 meaning:

1=flawless 2=good 3=average 4=passed 5=not passed but often eligible to repeat exam 6=out

Einstein grew up in Munich, this is his school grading.

ETH, and, as far as I know, Swiss schools do it the other way round:

6=flawless etc.

So for EACH document you have to look at the grading system of the respective time AND area until there is a word added to the mark IN THE DOCUMENT ITSELF.

As John Stachel has pointed out (2005, p. lxii), this is a single name, and would indicate one author, not two. The several academics and writers who uncritically recycle the Joffe story (e.g,, Senta Troemel-Ploetz [1], Andrea Gabor [2], Edith Borchhardt [3], Hilary Rose [4]) fail to appreciate that by endorsing it they are actually committing themselves to a contention that Mileva Einstein-Marić was the sole author of the 1905 papers, not the co-author with Einstein. One presumes that even they would not wish to go that far.

1. “Mileva Einstein-Marić: The Woman Who Did Einstein’s Mathematics.” Women’s Studies International Forum, vol 13, no. 5, 1990, p. 419.

2. Einstein’s Wife: Work and Marriage in the Lives of Five Great Twentieth Century Women. Viking Penguin, 1995, p. 20.

3. Women in the Shadows: Mileva Einstein-Marić et al. Peter Lang, 1994, p. 5.

4. Women, Science, and Technology: A Reader in Feminist Science Studies (ed. Mary Wyer et al). Routledge, 2001, p. 55.

So if (if!) ‘Einstein-Maric’ is indicated on a manuscript, it can mean several things.

But the whole point is that there is not a single piece of evidence that “Einstein-Maric” was written on the 1905 manuscripts, as I tried to make clear above. In relation to his/her discussion of the Joffe story “The Swiss” writes:

I find this aspect of the debate particularly funny and sad, because it shows the total ignorance of the social context relevant for a proper interpretation…

But there is no such “proper interpretation” to be made in this particular instance, as your discussion in that paragraph is predicated on a hypothetical, but actually false, premise!

For an informed discussion starting from what Joffe actually wrote, rather than the usual repetition of Trbuhovic-Gjuric’s account, see John Stachel here . (A full discussion of the story by me that tackles other aspects of the debate is here.)

Regarding academic performance: Given the situation at the time, missing your period when you are sexually active but not married was usually rather stressful and quite certainly not helping to perform well at any exam.

From the wording (“missing your period”) I take it to indicate that Maric was pregnant when she took the final diploma exams. But she was not pregnant when she failed the 1900 final exams. (It was when she took them and failed again a year later that she was some three months pregnant.)

On the situation for women at Zurich Polytechnic, no one disputes that women were massively disadvantaged when they wanted to acquire a scientific education (let alone a career in science). Nevertheless I distrust specific cases being treated solely on the basis of a general situation. No one knows how Maric was treated by her professors in a section of the Polytechnic where the number of female students for teaching science for those days was relatively high (around one sixth of the students). We know that the physics professor Heinrich Weber provisionally offered Maric an assistantship (more than he did for Einstein!) in his department, which doesn’t suggest he was biased against women going further.

you have to be aware that grades as data are not rock hard data exactly measuring talent

No one is suggesting they are. My discussion was in the context of the frequent claims that Maric was a brilliant student, and a brilliant mathematician. But in Maric’s case we do not have evidence of her ever producing a single idea of her own on advanced physics, nor, more specifically, on those Einstein was working on.

Also, I don’t find it unusual to call any continental university diploma a ‘degree’ even if it doesn’t match the Anglo-Saxon definition.

I totally agree that the syllabus was equivalent to a degree, but I do think one should be accurate. The department at the Polytechnic in question was specifically for training prospective teachers in secondary schools. I made the point in the context of the film alluding only to attitudes to women working at science later on, so I think my noting that the qualification enabled them to teach in schools without going further in science was justified.

And grade 5 is not ‘moderately good’, but ‘good’. For getting a 6 your performance has to be flawless.

I admit I had a problem with how to describe the value of grades, and I was not entirely consistent depending on the context. How does one deal with a situation when Troemel-Ploetz (without offering evidence) writes that Einstein’s 4.91 was below pass level, while Alana Cash says that Maric’s 4 was a pass grade and that Einstein’s final diploma grades were “poor” when his subject topic grades were 5, 5.5, 5 and 5? (Troemel-Ploetz is Swiss, and Cash spent time interviewing a senior librarian at the ETH, formerly Zurich Polytechnic.) But I entirely accept that where I wrote “a moderately good grade 5 in analytic geometry” I should have written “good”.

Also, you infer that her better grades after her return to Zurich are due to Einstein’s influence, although it may well have been Heidelberg’s effect.

I did not intend to imply that Maric’s better grades after her return to Zurich in 1898 were due to Einstein’s influence. My main point was that her improved grades, at least partly due to dealing with topics at which she was better, did not indicate any deterioration in her academic performance which the film implied had happened. The adding of the quotation from a 1901 Einstein letter was merely to suggest that there was an indication that Einstein assisted Maric, rather than that he was a detrimental influence. (Her being in love with Einstein was certainly a distraction, as for any student at college.) As for the suggestion of a “Heidelberg” effect, during the single semester she spent at Heidelberg University she enrolled as an auditor on a course on “Heat theory and electrodynamics”. In a letter Einstein wrote her at the time he lists these topics among those she was missing while away from the Polytechnic. The notion that the one semester at Heidelberg auditing in a limited number of topics somehow boosted her grades for the remaining two and a half years at the Polytechnic is a bit of a stretch.

You should also be careful that the absence of evidence for something is not necessary a proof to the contrary. If you consider non existence of data a proof, you’re doing the same as those whom you rightly!! criticise.

So you’re suggesting that when I point out that there is not a single authentic piece of evidence that Maric had any ideas of her own about the physics Einstein was working on, and that certain specific claims to this effect are documented to be erroneous, this puts me in the same class as those who make the claims?

I find the bit about the job also very intriguing: she turns down a job offer from the guy whom her lover is on so bad terms with that he refuses to give him a reference letter, and plans to apply for the librarian post instead. What was the motivation of the prof? Did he want to get at Einstein through her (sexual assault in workplace settings was not rare at the time)?

Talk about giving speculation free rein! All the candidates in their small group (total five in final year) were offered assistantships other than Einstein. One has only to read Einstein’s letters in this period to see why Weber might have been dubious about having him as an assistant. Here he is in late 1901 writing about Zurich University Prof Alfred Kleiner who was supervising his Ph.D. dissertation: “But if he dares to reject my dissertation, then I’ll publish his rejection along with my paper and make a fool of him.” (The dissertation was rejected the following year.) One can see why Weber might have been doubtful about having such an arrogant 21-year-old as an assistant without indulging in conspiracy theory about Weber having designs on Maric.

Out of all the speculative evidence-free suggestions in the last paragraph from “The Swiss” I’ll deal with a couple:

Was she afraid he [Prof Weber] would make advances?

Maric gave her reason to her friend Helen Kaufler, who wrote that it was “because of the students she did not wish to accept it”. One can only guess what she meant by this: quite possibly that as a 24 year-old young woman she would get problems from male students she would have to supervise – but who knows? Of course “The Swiss” could come back with another speculation and suggest the reason given to her friend was just a cover for the real reason. The delightful thing about speculative theories is that you can always counter any point made against you by another speculation.

Maybe her turning down the job together with that late period made it a bit hard to concentrate on the maths exam?

Leaving aside the erroneous “late period” (see above), this is more evidence-free dubious speculation. Why would it have been selectively hard to concentrate on just the maths exam, whereas in one physics topic, for instance, she obtained grade 5? We don’t even know if she had informed Weber before the examinations. The letter in question by Kaufler was written after Maric had finished her exams and before the results were out.

Asking is much more exciting in this story and gives more insights than jumping to conclusions!

Of course some people might find it exciting to speculate, usually from a basis of limited knowledge of the subject: there is no limit to speculation. How evidence-free speculation gives more insights than analyses that are based on well documented evidence eludes me. And perhaps “The Swiss” would give an example where I have jumped to conclusions without examining all the evidence available?

- Regarding the issue of name: In Switzerland, in official settings married couples (both wife and husband) used both names with a hyphen, while in less formal situations only the man’s name appeared. Had they remained married, and had Einstein died in Zurich, you would be reading ‘Albert Einstein-Maric’ on his death certificate. So if (if!) ‘Einstein-Maric’ is indicated on a manuscript, it can mean several things. It doesn’t mean that they necessarily wrote it together (but it can). However, if he hadn’t considered her to be an intellectual partner, it is more likely that he wouldn’t have bothered to use her name in this situation, so it does increase the likelihood that he though she understood what he was doing. Which cannot be said of all physicists of the time! I find this aspect of the debate particularly funny and sad, because it shows the total ignorance of the social context relevant for a proper interpretation–on both sides of this very strange war on the dead body of woman we don’t know about enough to assess.

- Regarding academic performance: Given the situation at the time, missing your period when you are sexually active but not married was usually rather stressful and quite certainly not helping to perform well at any exam. Also, though at Zurich, women were allowed to study comparatively early, for some time this applied only to foreign women. Though there were some women graduates already, for decades after Maric the general climate was still not too nice in the sciences, and especially at the polytechnic (it has only somewhat improved due to the efforts in the last 20 years!). This influences both performance and its assessment, and if you want to judge innate talent based on the grades and academic career, you have to be aware that grades as data are not rock hard data exactly measuring talent (actually, they aren’t even regarding male students). – Maybe you should do some further reading in this field.

Also, I don’t find it unusual to call any continental university diploma a ‘degree’ even if it doesn’t match the Anglo-Saxon definition. And grade 5 is not ‘moderately good’, but ‘good’. For getting a 6 your performance has to be flawless. Also, you infer that her better grades after her return to Zurich are due to Einstein’s influence, although it may well have been Heidelberg’s effect.

You should also be careful that the absence of evidence for something is not necessary a proof to the contrary. If you consider non existence of data a proof, you’re doing the same as those whom you rightly!! criticise.

On another note: I find the bit about the job also very intriguing: she turns down a job offer from the guy whom her lover is on so bad terms with that he refuses to give him a reference letter, and plans to apply for the librarian post instead. What was the motivation of the prof? Did he want to get at Einstein through her (sexual assault in workplace settings was not rare at the time)? Or did he just think that she was talented enough for the job and thought she would work well? In this case: did he overvalue her talent? Or was he right in her assessment, and her failure is not due to a lack of enough brains for maths, but to other (e.g. mental) reasons? Why did she turn down such a good job opportunity? Did she have an inferiority complex and was afraid she wouldn’t be able to do the job? Was she afraid he would make advances? If yes, was she assessing him right? Or was she just afraid to hurt Einstein if she went to work for someone he was on bad terms with (if yes: was it justified? Did Einstein want her to work there)? Maybe her turning down the job together with that late period made it a bit hard to concentrate on the maths exam? — Asking is much more exciting in this story and gives more insights than jumping to conclusions!