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).

[jerseydevil]

Einstein performed this monumental wok during his off-hours as a 26-year-old patent clerk in Bern, Switzerland; at the time, he was earning extra cash tutoring a student in electricity. But it would take his general theory of relativity to make him a bona fide celebrity on the world stage. Introduced in 1916, the theory states that space and time are curved and that such curvature produces the force of gravity. An independent experiment during a solar eclipse in 1919 confirmed that light rays from distant stars were bent by the sun’s gravity – exactly as Einstein had predicted. Einstein had unlocked one of the universe’s deep secrets, and newspapers hailed it as a scientific revolution. In a world still weary from the first World War, he was embraced as a symbol of humankind’s potential for nobler things.

Einstein came to Princeton with his second wife, Elsa Lowenthal – she was also his second cousin – and his secretary, Helen Dukas. They settled into the modest two-story framed house on Mercer Street. But it wasn’t a seamless transition for a man whose fame and concerns were of a global scale. “Into this small university town the chaotic voices of human strife barely penetrate,” he wrote in 1936 to Queen Elizabeth of Belgium, whom he had met at a scientific conference in Brussels. “I am almost ashamed to be living in such a place while all the rest struggle and suffer.”

Einstein eventually acclimated to his adopted hometown and even embraced the isolations he once lamented. He enjoyed sailing his boat, the Tinnef (“cheaply made” in Yiddish), on lake Carnegie, and he appreciated that the townsfolk respected his privacy. “You are surprised, aren’t you, at the contrast between my fame throughout the world…and the isolation and quiet in which I live,” Einstein once wrote in a private correspondence. “I wished for this isolation all my life, and now I have finally achieved it here in Princeton.” He befriended Gillet Griffin, a Princeton University art curator who became a family friend and frequent dinner guest the last years of Einstein’s life. “He liked that Princeton didn’t idolize him,” Griffin says. “He realized he was an icon, but he didn’t want a huge amount of notoriety. He would retreat if someone tried to get too close to him.”

While at the Institute for Advanced Study; Einstein published some 30 scientific papers, as well as open letters and essays on many scientific and social issues. Nonetheless, the popular image of Einstein during his Princeton years is one of a genial old man who hammed it up for photographers and often went without socks, even in winter. His obituary in the Trenton Evening Times recalled that local youths sought him out for help with their math problems. Einstein, the paper reported, “usually regaled them with cookies after he had given them answer to their perplexed inquiries.”

As a man who considered himself a citizen of the world, Einstein used his fame to advance favorite humanitarian causes, among them the creation of Israel as an independent state. Some people called him a Jewish saint. But Einstein wasn’t perfect. “He was a complex man with foibles like everyone else,” Calaprice says. “For example, he wasn’t very nice to his first wife and his children.” Einstein and Mileva Maric, who was to become his first wife, put up for adoption a child born out of wedlock. After he and Maric divorced, he became distant from his two sons, Hans Albert and Eduard. He engaged in affairs and acknowledged that he was a failure at both his marriages. Einstein’s work was his abiding passion.

He spent the bulk of his time at the institute pursuing a theory that would have united the four fundamental forces of nature – gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces. That theory remains elusive and a central focus for many theoretical physicists. “He tackled the most difficult and important problems he could conceive,” says institute director Peter Goddard. “You don’t always succeed when you tackle the most fundamental questions.”

In a way Einstein’s greatest achievement is that he attained international celebrity despite being immersed in a world of abstruse thought. Such is his aura that even today Einstein is synonymous with genius. But transcendent brilliance only partly explains his enduring status as a global pop icon. It’s the image of the elder Einstein – the kindly, rumpled professor with the wild, white mane that looked like it was combed with an eggbeater – that makes him universally recognized. His licensed image is plastered on coffee mugs, T-shirts, and calendars. He even has a bobble-head doll. Einstein’s visage has graced hundreds of products, from Martin guitars and Microsoft software to Mylanta and Mello Yellow soft drinks. His estate is controlled by Hebrew University in Jerusalem, which he helped establish in 1925; the Canadian Broadcasting Company recently reported that the university received $10 million from the sale of Einstein memorabilia over the past twenty years.

Given all the fanfare, it’s bewildering that official Princeton would have taken so long to join in. This month, finally, in the town where he lived longer than anywhere else, the man who changed the way we view the universe will be memorialized in a most public setting – seizing, as it were, his own time in his own space.

New Jersey Monthy, April 2005

[Count Comfect]

EMC Square is the perfect name for something celebrating him.

[cassiopeia]

I look forward to this discussion. I've always admired Einstein -- not only for his scientific work but because of his life as well; he's one of my heroes.

[jerseydevil]

Anyone who is interested - I have now posted above the Einstein article from NJ Monthly's April edition.

[Nurvingiel]

Did you type all that out for us? Thanks JD!

I found an interesting site with Einstein's biography (fairly short). Here's one quote that really grabbed my attention:

By 1930 he was making international visits again, back to the United States. A third visit to the United States in 1932 was followed by the offer of a post at Princeton. The idea was that Einstein would spend seven months a year in Berlin, five months at Princeton. Einstein accepted and left Germany in December 1932 for the United States. The following month the Nazis came to power in Germany and Einstein was never to return there.

I started wondering what if things had turned out differently, and Einstein hadn't gone to the United states? A great mind could have been lost. (Which then led me to wonder, how many great minds were lost? Which seems mean since every single person murdered by the Nazis deserved to live. But this is all a bit OT. Anyway just some thoughts, inspired by Einstein.)
I also noticed he debated with the people responsible for making first year chemistry hideous - Bohr, de Broglie, Planck (edit) and Heisenberg, and Schrödinger. Can't forget those guys!...

EDIT:
Forgot the link to the biography I was reading.
http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~.../Einstein.html

[jerseydevil]

Originally Posted by Nurvingiel

Did you type all that out for us? Thanks JD!

Yes I DID type that all in. I'm glad you appreciate it. I hate typing things from magazines and things. But anyway - I thought it was interesting and it'll be fun to see the many events in princeton that are planned. I suppose I should try to go to the unveiling - that's the day before I go to AC for the Governors Conference on Tourism. Then April 23rd is Communiveristy along Nassau Street. It used to be called Town & Gown, it's a huge street festival where the town and university join together.