Free Genius by James Gleick

Euclid to Newton to Einstein.
    The Feynmans had never heard of Bohr or any of the other physicists gathering in Chicago, but, like most other American newspaper readers, they knew Einstein’s name well. That summer he was traveling in Europe, uprooted, having left Germany for good, preparing to arrive in New York Harbor in October. For fourteen years America had been in the throes of a publicity craze over this “mathematician.” The New York Times , the Feynmans’ regular paper, had led a wave of exaltation with only one precedent, the near deification of Edison a generation earlier. No theoretical scientist, European or American, before or since, ignited such a fever of adulation. A part of the legend, the truest part, was the revolutionary import of relativity for the way citizens of the twentieth century should conceive their universe. Another part was Einstein’s supposed claim that only twelve people worldwide could understand his work. “Lights All Askew in the Heavens,” the Times reported in a 1919 classic of headline writing. “Einstein Theory Triumphs. Stars Not Where They Seem or Were Calculated to Be, but Nobody Need Worry. A Book for 12 Wise Men. No More in the World Could Comprehend It, Said Einstein.” A series of editorials followed. One was titled “Assaulting the Absolute.” Another declared jovially, “Apprehensions for the safety of confidence even in the multiplication table will arise.”

    The presumed obscurity of relativity contributed heavily to its popularity. Yet had Einstein’s message really been incomprehensible it could hardly have spread so well. More than one hundred books arrived to explain the mystery. The newspapers mixed tones of reverence and self-deprecating amusement about the mystery of relativity’s paradoxes; in actuality, they and their readers correctly understood the elements of this new physics. Space is curved—curved where gravity warps its invisible fabric. The ether is banished, along with the assumption of an absolute frame of reference for space and time. Light has a fixed velocity, measured at 186,000 miles per second, and its path bends in the sway of gravity. Not long after the general theory of relativity was transmitted by underwater cable to eager New York newspapers, schoolchildren who could barely compute the hypotenuse of a right triangle could nevertheless recite a formula of Einstein’s, E equals MC squared, and some could even report its implication: that matter and energy are theoretically interchangeable; that within the atom lay unreleased a new source of power. They sensed, too, that the universe had shrunk. It was no longer merely everything —an unimaginable totality. Now it might be bounded, thanks to four-dimensional curvature, and somehow it began to seem artificial. As the English physicist J. J. Thomson said unhappily, “We have Einstein’s space, de Sitter’s space, expanding universes, contracting universes, vibrating universes, mysterious universes. In fact the pure mathematician may create universes just by writing down an equation … he can have a universe of his own.”

    There will never be another Einstein—just as there will never be another Edison, another Heifetz, another Babe Ruth, figures towering so far above their contemporaries that they stood out as legends, heroes, half-gods in the culture’s imagination. There will be, and almost certainly have already been, scientists, inventors, violinists, and baseball players with the same raw genius. But the world has grown too large for such singular heroes. When there are a dozen Babe Ruths, there are none. In the early twentieth century, millions of Americans could name exactly one contemporary scientist. In the late twentieth century, anyone who can name a scientist at all can name a half-dozen or more. Einstein’s publicists, too, belonged to a more naïve era; icons are harder to build in a time of demythologizing, deconstruction, and pathography. Those