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Popular Culture Review
musicality in the sphere of thought.” His face is as familiar as his high-pitched
accented voice: the kindly old professor who shows up with his violin at posh
parties, in Richard Powers’s novel The Time o f our Singing (2003), playing an
ode to joy. He is omnipresent, and like God, speaks when you’re ready to listen.
His influence is so pervasive, even economics isn’t exempt—witness Nobel
Laureate Paul Krugman’s jocular essay on “Theory of Interstellar Trade”
(1978). But Einstein is no joke—and if we self-destruct, who will have the guts
to laugh?
Stripping Einstein, laying him bare, is as daring and difficult as what
Einstein himself did in searching for what he called “secrets of the old one” (i.e.,
God). Indiana Jones had nothing on him, the supreme archaeologist of the
knowable. The Strip is a prime example. For even neon (tube) lights
demonstrate how light emits energy, how energy and mass are interconvertible,
how as a consequence, a little bit of mass goes a very long way, and very fast,
and how free fall (or constant acceleration) is indistinguishable from gravity, as
Vegas Vic found out the hard way, when, like Lenin or Saddam Hussein, they
tried to take him down. Old Vic had one edge on those guys: being made of light
to begin with, he couldn’t be decomposed or dismantled. Which is why he’s still
standing, shining up and down old Fremont Street, without any help from his
neighbor, Claes Oldenburg’s inverted “Flashlight” (1981), on UNLV’s campus.
By contrast, 3,000 miles away, Einstein is shrouded in twilight, reclining in
stillness beside the National Academy of Sciences, as we stumble across him,
sculpted by Robert Berks (1974) in Potomac Park (Washington, DC), grasping a
tablet written (as Galileo would say) in the universal language of nature:
mathematics. We often see children at play, climbing all over Albert as
nonchalantly as he reduced a life-long obsession with physics to motives of pure
sport: “because it amuses me.” The contrast between Einstein slouching in
frozen