THE SUDDENLY FAMOUS DOCTOR EINSTEIN 311So it was, and so it remained everywhere and at all times during Einstein's life.
The quality of his science had long since sufficed to command the admiration of
his peers. Now his name also became a byword to the general public because of
the pictures, verbal and visual, created by that new power of the twentieth century,
the media. Some of these images were cheap, some brilliant (as in the blending of
kings and apostles into twelve wise men). Einstein's science and the salesmanship
of the press were necessary but not sufficient conditions for the creation of the
legend, however. Compare, for example, the case of Einstein with the one and
only earlier instance in which a major discovery in physics had created a world-
wide sensation under the influence of newspapers. That was the case of Roentgen
and the X-rays he discovered in 1895. It was the discovery, not the man, that was
at the center of attention. Its value was lasting and it has never been forgotten by
the general public, but its newsworthiness went from a peak into a gentle steady
decline.
The essence of Einstein's unique position goes deeper and has everything to do,
it seems to me, with the stars and with language. A new man appears abruptly,
the 'suddenly famous Doctor Einstein.' He carries the message of a new order in
the universe. He is a new Moses come down from the mountain to bring the law
and a new Joshua controlling the motion of heavenly bodies. He speaks in strange
tongues but wise men aver that the stars testify to his veracity. Through the ages,
child and adult alike had looked with wonder at stars and light. Speak of such
new things as X-rays or atoms and man may be awed. But stars had forever been
in his dreams and his myths. Their recurrence manifested an order beyond human
control. Irregularities in the skies—comets, eclipses—were omens, mainly of evil.
Behold, a new man appears. His mathematical language is sacred yet amenable
to transcription into the profane: the fourth dimension, stars are not where they
seemed to be but nobody need worry, light has weight, space is warped. He fulfills
two profound needs in man, the need to know and the need not to know but to
believe. The drama of his emergence is enhanced (though this to me seems sec-
ondary) by the coincidence—itself caused largely by the vagaries of war—between
the meeting of the joint societies and the first annual remembrance of horrid events
of the recent past which had caused millions to die, empires to fall, the future to
be uncertain. The new man who appears at that time represents order and power.
He becomes the ddos avrjp, the divine man, of the twentieth century.
In the late years, when I knew him, fame and publicity were a source of amuse-
ment and sometimes of irritation to Einstein, whose tribe revered no saints. Pho-
tographs and film clips indicate that in his younger years he had the ability to
enjoy his encounters with the press and the admiration of the people. As I try to
find the best way to characterize Einstein's deeper response to adulation, I am
reminded of words spoken by Lord Haldane when he introduced Einstein to an
audience at King's College in London on June 13, 1921. On that first visit to