Einstein

[jerseydevil]

April 18th is the 50th anniversary of Einstein's death.

I felt like starting this thread so people can discuss him, his life, his theories, whatever. I live by where he spent the last 22 years of his life, Princeton, which was actually the longest place he had ever lived. A lot of celebrations are planned during 2005 for Einstein. They're just finishing up work on EMC Square, where a bust of him will finally be unveiled and displayed. This monument has had a lot of controversy, because for the longest time it was felt that Einstein did not want any memorial or shrine. Well now Princeton will finally celebarate the life of one of the most famous Princeton residents.

Einstein= Major Celebration2

The world-famous physicist spent his Princeton years in relative quiet, sailing on Lake Carnegie and helping neigborhood kids with their homework. At last, on the 50th anniversay of his death, the town is trumpeting the man who changed the way we see the universe.

On a chilly afternoon in late December, on the grounds of Princeton’s Borough Hall, Melvin Benarde stands opposite a twelve-by-twelve-foot concrete square bordered by a wooden frame. The slab was poured the day before amid a small celebration, and Benarde pauses as he gently rests his foot on the frame. “When I this yesterday,” he says with a hint of emotion, “I knew that all of the talk was over and that this thing is finally becoming reality.”

Reality won’t become official until 10:00am on April 18, when a planned unveiling will reveal a two-foot-tall silicon bronze bust of Albert Einstein, supported by a six-foot-high granite pillar atop a concrete base. The bust will anchor EMC Square – the pun invoking, of course, the famous equation that most people can attribute to Einstein but few, presumably, could explain.

It’s taken Princeton a full half-century since Einstein’s death, and a dozen years since Benarde first proposed the memorial site, to formally recognized the genius whose unmistakable visage is recognized the world over. Throughout its rich history, this Ivy League town has seen it’s share of famous faces – the shaggy-haired professor is one of many Nobel Prize winners from Princeton – yet the most frequent query posed by visitors to the town’s historical society remains “Where’s Einstein?”

Until recently, it was a perfectly valid questions. Other than his former home at 112 Mercer Street, now a private residence, as well as a small quirky memorabilia display in the back of Landau of Princeton, a woolen shop on Nassau Street, the town has been curiously devoid of any hint that Time magazine’s Person of the Century lived his final 22 years here. Einstein busts are displayed at the Institute for Advanced Study, where he taught, and at the math and science library on the Princeton University campus, but neither is accessible to the general public.

When Benarde began his grassroots campaign for an Einstein monument in 1993, he and those who joined his cause never imagined it would take so long to realize their goal; the Eiffel Tower was conceived and built in less than half the time it took to erect the Einstein bust. But efforts stymied by town politics, fund-raising concerns, and the belief that Einstein didn’t want any monuments, he had made it clear that he didn’t want his home turned into a shrine. “There was this myth in Princeton that Einstein didn’t want any memorial for him in town,” says Alice Calaprice, a former senior editor at Princeton University Press who worked on Einstein’s papers for more than twenty years. “I never found that in any of his papers. After all, this was a man who sat for numerous photographers and artists.”

With 2005 slated to be a yearlong Einsteinfest both locally and globally, one wonders what the venerable professor would think of all the fuss. He once confided that he considered his achievements overrated. The United Nations has decreed 2005 the International year of Physics, in part to celebrate the 100th anniversary of five papers Einstein wrote that rocked the academic world. The long-awaited statue at Borough Hall will be unveiled on the 50th anniversary of Einstein’s death at age 76, and a series of events in town will honor the man throughout the year. Other than, say, Springsteen and Asbury Park, or Sinatra and Hoboken, it’s hard to find a stronger link in the public’s imagination between a single figure and a New Jersey town.

By the time Einstein left Nazi Germany and settled in Princeton in 1933 to become a professor at the nascent Institute for Advanced Study, he was an international superstar whose best scientific work was behind him. His theories f relativity had reworked the cosmic order established by Sir Isaac Newton. He had proved the existence of atoms. He had explained why the sky is blue, calculating a formula for the scattering of light by molecules in the atmosphere. His work with light particles earned him his Nobel in 1921.

Einstein wowed the world of science in 1905 with a handful of papers published in rapid succession in the prestigious Annalen der Physik that revolutionized the concept of theoretical science. One of those laid out his special theory of relativity, his premise that space and time are not absolute measurements but vary as objects move relative to each other near the speed of light. Einstein later put it this way: “An hour sitting with a pretty girl on a park bench passes like a minute, but a minute sitting on a hot stove seems like an hour.” That’s not quite the way physicists use the theory in their work, but it does apply to experiments in which particles move at super rates of speed.

Einstein then expanded the theory and concluded that energy and mass are equivalent. The formula E=MC2 states that energy equals mass times the speed of light squared. This showed that one could get a lot of energy from a tiny bit of mass, Other scientists would liberate that energy from atoms and usher in the nuclear age, Much to the horror of Einstein, an avowed pacifist, his work would later prove pivotal in the development of nuclear weapons.

continued...

I will post the article that appears in NJ monthly, but I will most likely either have to type it (which I don't want to do) or wait until they have it on their website (which I hope will be before April 18th).