Word: physicist
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...persona and pronouncements became legends. Asked why he used one soap for washing as well as shaving, he replied, "Two soaps? That is too complicated." Even when receiving visitors like David Ben-Gurion (who later offered him the presidency of Israel), Einstein often would be tieless and sockless. Recalls Physicist-Biographer Banesh Hoffmann, who worked with Einstein: "He never tried to show you how clever he was. He always made you feel comfortable...
Later, when A-bombs exploded over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Einstein expressed deep regret. After the war, he apologized personally ?and in tears?to visiting Japanese Physicist Hideki Yukawa. On another occasion, he said, "Had I known that the Germans would not succeed in developing an atomic bomb, I would have done nothing for the bomb...
What has aroused Einsteinophiles especially is a 12-ft.-high bronze statue of the physicist that will be unveiled in April by the National Academy of Sciences on Washington's Constitution Avenue. Critics have attacked Sculptor Robert Berks for his "bubble gum" style, the astrological connotation of the star-studded base and the statue's cost (at least $1.6 million). Others insist that no statue could really be appropriate; Einstein, after all, was so opposed to posthumous veneration that he willed his ashes to be scattered at an undisclosed place. Constantly called upon to pose for photographers, painters and sculptors...
...renaissance of interest in his scientific work. Before his death in 1955 at 76, Einstein had called himself a "museum piece," a fossil who had long since slipped out of the mainstream of physics. Indeed, his greatest work, general relativity, fell into an intellectual limbo. Explains University of Texas Physicist John Wheeler: "For the first half-century of its life, general relativity was a theorist's paradise but an experimentalist's hell. No theory was more difficult to test." Physicists turned to other concepts, mostly concerning atomic structure, that could be more easily verified and had more applications...
...that view has undergone a dramatic change. Says West German Physicist Carl Friedrich von Weizsacker: "Einstein's true greatness lies in the fact that he remains relevant today, in spite of the breakthroughs that have occurred since his death." Indeed, it is many of those breakthroughs that have contributed to the Einstein revival...