Orchids Come In Handy Poem by gershon hepner

Seeking in the stars what was denied
to him on earth caused Einstein to pursue
his happiness in ways that are decried
by those who take the Bible’s point of view.
Marie Curie took Langevin as lover,
though she was married and he was as well,
the Nobel Prize gave her a little cover,
but Langevin from journalists got hell.
William Anderson thought he was evil
pursuing a young girl who was fourteen,
without gene therapy he was a devil,
and so got fourteen years, which is obscene.
What Erwin Schrödinger taught of the feline
that lives and dies the same time in a box
is unconnected to the mistress beeline
he made to have a ménage with a fox.
In Dublin he had lots of love affairs and fathered
a lot of offspring like a tom that’s randy;
if rosebuds in the summer are not gathered,
fine orchids in the winter come in handy.

Dennis Overbye (“Crossed by the Stars They Reach For, ” NY Times, February 13,2007) , writes about the sexual indiscretion of famous scientists and Lisa Nowak, an astronaut who wore diapers while stalking another astronaut who who was her sexual competitor.

Captain Nowak’s humiliation brings to mind the plight of Marie Curie, who won the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics with her husband, Pierre, for discovering radium and who has been a role model for female scientists ever since. As detailed in Susan Quinn’s biography, “Marie Curie: A Life, ” she was nearly hounded out of Paris in 1911 when it was discovered that she was having an affair with Paul Langevin, one of Pierre’s students, who was married with four children. Pierre was run over by a carriage in the street in 1906. Drawn together by mutual grief, Paul and Marie set up an apartment near the Sorbonne as a love nest. Langevin’s wife sent a man to break into the apartment, obtaining love letters, which his mother-in-law then shared with the newspapers. “The fires of radium which beam so mysteriously have just lit a fire in the heart of one of the scientists who studies their action so devotedly; and the wife and children of this scientist are in tears, ” read one article. France was apparently more strait-laced then than now, and the press vilified the lovebirds. Langevin challenged the editor of one newspaper to a duel, but neither man could bring himself to fire his pistol. The only violence occurred when Langevin showed up for work bruised and beaten and said his wife had hit him with a chair. In the midst of the brouhaha, Curie won another Nobel, for chemistry, but the Swedish academy suggested she stay away from the awards ceremony. She went anyway.
Albert Einstein, who met Curie for the first time at a meeting in Brussels that year, wrote home that he didn’t really see what the fuss was all about. “She has a sparkling intelligence, but despite her passionate nature, she is not attractive enough to represent a threat to anyone, ” he wrote. Einstein was soon to have his own problems with adultery. For most of the years that he was inventing his supreme achievement, the general theory of relativity, which predicted the bending of light, the expanding universe and black holes, he was having an affair with his cousin Elsa and fending off suspicions, accusations and emotional breakdowns from his wife, Mileva. His oldest son stopped speaking to him at various times. In his divorce deposition, Einstein admitted that there had been physical violence in the marriage, but said his wife was the one who had started it.Einstein continued to have affairs after he married Elsa in 1919. One of them, according to a letter in the Einstein archive at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, commenced with the by-then-famous physicist sneaking into the house of his friend Hans Muhsam, to be with his niece Betty Neumann, whom he then hired as a secretary. With his wife’s explicit permission, Einstein carried on with Neumann for about a year. Einstein broke off the affair in 1924, saying that he had to seek in the stars what had been denied him on the Earth. But he was pursued by and involved with other women for the rest of his life. If you are an Einstein, the stars are never enough.

2/13/07