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Photos: Reidar Hahn, Fermilab;
Michael Hyde and David Harris, SLAC
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by Judy Jackson
His mug’s on mugs,
Bears wear his hair;
Albert turns up everywhere.
His famed equation greets the eyes
From every form of merchandise;
T-shirts and ties he doth adorn.
Is there Albert Einstein porn?
Tots and geezers recognize him;
Every market sector buys him.
The world, it seems, will never weary
Of him and his relativity theory.
Year after year, folks take a likin’
To Einstein as a cultural icon.
Font of a vast commercial venture, he
Made Time magazine’s "Man of the Century."
Who’d have thought a patent clerk
Would rise above that line of work
To symbolize for humankind
The greatness of the human mind?
That hair, that tongue, that life, that brain–
Remind us of all we might attain.
Would Albert E. have found it rich
To have become the king of kitsch? |
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"Thus on three levels a summing-up of Einstein, decades after his death, can claim that as a physicist his genius
is quite undiluted by modern techniques that can test his theories with a rigor unimaginable in his own day; that
his influence on public affairs, certainly pervasive but of a strength less than he would have wished, was of a kind
to be applauded by all those who still retain hope for the human race; and that as a human being the reality of
his life equaled the myth. No man of his intellectual ability, no man who had so decisively changed the concepts
of the universe, could hope for more."
Einstein: The Life and Times,
Ronald W. Clark
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