Genius on Parade
JR., EDWIN M. YODER
Genius on Parade Einstein comes to America. BY EDWIN M. YODER JR. You must, perhaps, have been born no later than 1940 to recall the exalted standing Albert Einstein enjoyed in American...
...As it stands, the reader must hack his way through wildernesses of lists, long-forgotten names, and endlessly duplicated schedules of greeting and reception...
...But it was not Weizmann, the stolid Manchester chemist, but Einstein the mathematical magus (surely the word fi ts) who captured most of the headlines as the Zionist party shuttled among New York, Philadelphia, Washington, Chicago, Boston, and Hartford...
...When his dazzling and erudite address ended, a half-dozen of us retired to decide what he had said and write a collaborative account for the student newspaper...
...Einstein, a lucid exposition of the 1950s...
...The intimation was that this theorist of the Fourth Dimension of space/time was, after all, homely and unthreatening...
...Chaim Weizmann and others to raise funds for the Zionist enterprise, and specifi cally for the new Hebrew University in Jerusalem...
...There was occasional worry about the ethical implications of the Einstein theory...
...Henderson was said to be one of the 12 people in the world who understood Relativity...
...It was a relief to fi nd that the “father” of Relativity (as if the good doctor had collaborated with the Creator on Day One to stage the Big Bang) was a jolly, elfi n fi gure with long, curly locks and soft eyes who resembled more a Bohemian musician or painter than a dangerous Dr...
...Albert Meets America is a documentary chronicle, drawn from newspaper accounts, of a signal episode in the building of the Einstein legend: the great physicist’s fi rst visit to America in the spring of 1921...
...is a former editor and columnist in Washington...
...In Brooklyn there was discovered a 16-year-old lad who made 13...
...You must, perhaps, have been born no later than 1940 to recall the exalted standing Albert Einstein enjoyed in American popular myth...
...Frankenstein...
...His moxie was extraordinary...
...Archibald Henderson, retired professor of mathematics, authorized biographer of George Bernard Shaw, and (to the present point) friend and interpreter of Dr...
...If both the New York Times and the New York Post reported the same events, the editor democratically includes both overlapping accounts...
...Einstein’s appearance and manner...
...As usual, when the esoteric stirs popular fascination, the subtext is unease...
...But on the evidence displayed here, the pawky effort of newspaper scribes to convey the subtleties of Relativity were a princely waste of paper and ink...
...Rarely in this heaping blizzard of old clippings, retrieved by their editor from the Einstein archive, does one encounter any engaging popularization: nothing at all like Lincoln Barnett’s The Universe and Dr...
...A brief personal memory: In the early winter of 1953, initiates of the freshman honorary Phi Eta Sigma at Chapel Hill were addressed by Dr...
...His hair, his eyes, his posture, speech, and dress (even his fl oppy, outsized hat, which blew off on Seventh Avenue in Manhattan and was “athletically” chased down by Dr...
...Elusiveness, however, merely intensifi ed public fascination...
...Such was the mystique of the new physics in that more innocent age...
...But philosophers assured their fretful audiences that Relativity was no threat to moral truth...
...Einstein himself) were objects of remark...
...But hopes were high...
...Einstein lectured (at the City College of New York and at Princeton, which awarded him an honorary degree) and was lionized and interviewed by an awed press and public...
...and there were no fulminations (none, at least, recorded here) from holy-roller pulpits...
...At the time, the present confi guration of the Middle East was unformed, in fl ux...
...This book is a good idea, but would have been better had it been more selectively edited...
...He came with Dr...
...America was struggling manfully to make friends with modern science...
...Its implications for the commonsense world were elusive, although it inspired learned speculation about the nature of gravity and the shape and size of the universe...
...In the spring of 1921 most of the reporting was, with rare exceptions, coy and patronizing, although in The Freeman Gertrude Besse King wrote perceptively, and with Shakespearean overtones: It is the necromancy of these strange theories, not their science, that catches the gaping crowd...
...The Arab Revolt had helped the British drive the Turks from Palestine and, at Versailles, the British had assumed a Palestinian “mandate” that would prove far more troublesome than anyone then imagined...
...Weizmann’s work on high explosives in the Great War—he was popularly, if rather inexactly, identifi ed as “the inventor of TNT”—had helped win the Balfour Declaration...
...Edwin M. Yoder Jr...
...It implied that there was no fi xed “hitching post” in the universe which, though fi nite, had no boundaries, space/ time being curvilinear...
...This usually took the form of jokey references to Dr...
...It was, again, a fi xed superstition, a canard that refused to yield to Einstein’s own laughing demurrers, that “only” a dozen earthly highbrows understood Relativity...
...At half the length this could have been a more reader-friendly chronicle...
...Reporters . . . instinctively . . . know that most of us are essentially children still clamoring for fairy tales . . . restless with the prisonhouse of this too, too solid world...
...The Theory of Relativity, general and special, was for lay people a mystery from the abstract realm of bodies moving at or near the speed of light, epitomized in the most famous of physical formulae: E=mc2...
...He died in 1955 and left no successor, not even the ill-fated “father of the atomic bomb,” J. Robert Oppenheimer...
Vol. 13 • March 2008 • No. 28
