Einstein On The Strip: A Meditation on
Fame, Fate, and the Laws of (Meta)physics
Abstract
"Einstein on the Strip: A Meditation on Fame, Fate, and Laws o f
(Meta)physics ” was presented as the keynote address at the
FWPCA/FWACA 21stAnnual Meeting, UNLV, March 14, 2009.
Who or what is Einstein? What does his name mean or signify? What
does the word Einstein evoke, and how do we respond to seeing or
hearing it? Why Einstein, o f all people? And just who or what is he,
to us? The man and the myth are almost identical. Yet we must give
each one its due, without getting them all mixed up. Then we shall see
why popular culture cannot be, even for a nanosecond, without both
the real and the mythical Einstein: especially in Las Vegas, the fusion
o f myth and reality, energy and annihilation, miracle o f death and
rebirth, equating revenue with renewal.
Einstein is everywhere. Everywhere and everywhen. He has
metamorphosed: he’s a phantasmagoria, a kaleidoscope with soundtrack. We
hear solo strings1 from the opera Einstein on the Beach (Philip Glass, Robert
Wilson, 1976), forlorn echoes of the wandering Jew, as desolate as the cosmos:
“I am death, destroyer of worlds.” [Oppenheimer, quoting the Bhagavad-Gita as
he fled from Trinity test site, July 16, 1945.] Playing off Scripture (“the
physicists have known sin”), Oppy mourned science, wrote his own epitaph,
solemnly warned that “the people of the world must unite or they will perish.”
No one heeded the cries of conscience—except for Einstein, who heard them
reverberating in his own mind long before they were uttered—and greeted them
with stony silence.
The news isn’t all bad, especially for those of us who find solace in the
heavens, and discover in the subatomic realm a soothing refuge for weary heaps
of flesh. Defying sorcery, Prospero hums in a new key “we are such dreams as
stuff is made o f ’ (Rebecca Goldstein, Properties o f Light: A Novel o f Love,
Betrayal and Quantum Physics, 2000). Einstein’s shadow engulfs this magical
stage. As he consoled (1955) his best friend’s widow (Anna Winteler Besso)
“He has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means
nothing. For us believing physicists, the distinction between past, present and
future is only a stubborn illusion.” Then Einstein died, too, yet he’s still around,
part of the very ether he abolished. And hovering above us, in his immanent
immensity. He emerges out of dark matter, playing the—accompanied on the
piano by his sister, Maja, at an intimate soiree at his Mercer Street home in
Princeton—exhibiting what (in reference to Niels Bohr) he called “the highest