A Look On The Lighter Side: So — How well did Einstein’s mother understand his work?

Judy Epstein

My older boy is a graduate student in theoretical physics. I save scrap paper for him because, whenever he comes home for a visit, he covers every piece with incomprehensible diagrams and equations.

“What is that?” I ask him.

“Math,” he replies.

But it doesn’t look like any math I’ve ever seen. There are no numerals, no letters… I don’t even recognize the symbols he is using.

This does not surprise anybody, as I was a philosophy major. But not even his father, the electrical engineer, who is used to equations with sigmas and matrices, has ever before seen most of this stuff.

“So… what are you proving?” his father asks him.

“Driving a conventional superconductor with an appropriately tuned classical electromagnetic field can lead to an enhancement of superconductivity,” our son tells him.

“I’m so proud of him!” his dad and I say, together, as we tiptoe out of the room.

“So — did you understand any of that?” I ask my husband.

“Not one word!” he replies. “Isn’t it wonderful?”

It made me wonder whether other parents understood their children’s work any better. So I asked around.

It was hard to get Stephen Hawking’s late mother to focus on his achievements. “It was such a shame about that terrible disease,” she kept saying. “He only outlived me by five years — so unfair!”

“Yes, absolutely,” I agree. “But even so, he managed to accomplish so much! What I’m wondering is, were you ever able to get a firm grasp of what he was doing?”

“Well, it was a bit difficult, now that you mention it — even just to wrap my mind around that book of his.”

“You mean, his first popular success, ‘A Brief History of Time.’ ”

“Yes, that one,” she said. “Now, I love irony as much as the next person, but really…!” She lowered her voice to a whisper to add, “It was a bit of a slog.”

“It was a best-seller though,” I pointed out.

“Indeed it was!” And she walked away, beaming from ear to ear.

Next, I had a question for Annie Wecklein, mother of Werner Heisenberg.

“Congratulations on your son’s Nobel Prize in 1932,” I began.

“Thank you, I’m very proud,” she replied.

“But I have a question. When he talked about quantum mechanics with you, could you understand it?”

“No, of course not,” she replied. “I’m not sure anybody does, really. It’s enough for me that the Nobel Committee thought they did and gave him that prize.”

“And his ‘Uncertainty Principle’ — was he ever able to make that clear, for you?”

“It’s funny you should mention that,” she said. “He used to say, ‘Mother, it’s like this. I can either tell you what the time is, at the end of my day, or elsewhere I will be — but never both.’ He said it was a matter of principle.”

“Physicists will be physicists,” I said, and we both had a little laugh.

My final stop was Erwin Schrödinger’s mom, Georgine Emilia. “I studied your son’s work, when I was in college,” I told her.

“And why wouldn’t you?” she replied. “He was a genius!”

“Yes, he was. But I wanted to ask you — were you able to understand that ‘thought experiment’ of his — with the cat in the box? You know, how there’s an equal chance it’s alive or it’s dead…so he said it’s actually half of each? Did that make any sense to you?”

“Ach, the cat!” she laughed. “Everyone asks me about that. Here’s what really happened. He was an only child, you know, so he spent a lot of time playing with the family cat. And we always joked about that cat that, whatever side of the door it was on, it always mewled and cried because it wanted to be on the other.

“So Erwin, he got tired of this, and found a box, and put the little cat inside, and put it in the middle of the doorway. ‘There you go!’ he said to the cat. ‘Now you must be happy, for you are both in and out at the same time!’ ”

“And was it? Happy, I mean?”

“Of course not!” She chuckled. “But I was always grateful that at least I could understand that one experiment of his, because everything else was impossible! Even here in the afterlife, there isn’t enough time for understanding quantum theory!”

After that, I felt a little better about my own inability. At least, I’m in good company.

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