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The Museum of Science’s ‘Einstein’ makes the grade
BY NINA MACLAUGHLIN
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At the age of 16, Albert Einstein, who you may have heard was pretty smart, failed the history and language portions of an entrance exam at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. Had he been a less self-directed young man and gotten a job at the local Burger King, we might be speaking German now. But young Albert was a resourceful soul, and not bad at math and science, and what amounts to his senior-year high-school report card reveals that though languages, like hair care, remained a mystery (he rated a 3 out of a possible 6 in French), he eventually mastered his history (a 6 out of 6). The subject might have come in handy, except that — as "Einstein," a massive new traveling exhibit opening this Saturday at the Museum of Science, points out — the young man soon changed the course of civilization. He’d have done better to brush up on his French. Einstein lived long enough to witness his own deification — even in his own time his name became synonymous with genius — but we’ve become so familiar with his name that we’ve lost the man. Enter "Einstein," an exhibit so exhaustive, it’s making just four stops in the whole world. It includes a love letter to his first wife, a tea set, a diary, and his 1921 Nobel Prize. Einstein’s famous 1939 letter to Franklin Roosevelt warning that the Nazis might split the atom is placed side by side with Roosevelt’s three-paragraph response (prefacing the formation of the Manhattan Project) for the first time since they left the president’s desk. And there are interactive displays, ranging from the practical to the historical, that animate his most famous theories about light and time, energy and gravity. You can use a laser light to transmit sound, or look at manuscript pages from the Special and General Theories of Relativity, or witness the gravitational distortion a black hole would have on your body, or enter a cloud chamber and track the trails of cosmic rays. "One of the exhibit’s fortes," says Daniel Davis, one of the museum’s Einstein experts, "is that it helps demystify the core concepts and brings them down to an everyday, non-mathematical, intuitive level." Images on an interactive wall-size computer screen, for example, get warped and distorted by the mass of your own body as an illustration of the General Theory of Relativity, which enables us to understand gravity as not so much a unilateral force but a warping of a single entity called spacetime. "The impression is that these concepts are inaccessible and abstract," says Davis, "but the exhibit is the exact opposite. It’s very interactive." It’s impossible to exaggerate the impact Einstein had on science, but what makes an examination of his life and ideas pertinent today? "There’s a section of the exhibit on Einstein as a global citizen," Davis explains, "that shows how he was an advocate for social rights and for peace." (One example: a 1952 letter from Israel offering Einstein the presidency.) The scientist was an adamant humanitarian, Davis continues, and despite his letter to FDR advising atomic research, he remained an ardent supporter of nuclear disarmament and an opponent of war and weapons of mass destruction. In 1933, when Einstein fled Germany for the US, he declared, "As long as I have any choice in the matter, I will live only in a country where civil liberty, tolerance, and equality of all citizens before the law prevail." We’re left to wonder whether he would’ve made the choice to come here today. "Einstein" runs from March 13 to June 16 at the Museum of Science, Science Park in Boston. Admission is $13, $11 for seniors, and $10 for children ages 3 to 11; call (617) 723-2500.
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