Well, nuclear physics managed to invent the most deadly weapon yet known... and Einstein is the Genius Incarnate in the collective mind
Christopher Frayling makes just this point (which I don't disagree with) in Mad, Bad and Dangerous? The Scientist and the Cinema (2005), which I was reading before I left for D.C.:
In the same year as Margaret Mead's pioneering survey of schoolchildren's attitudes [toward scientists, 1957], Roland Barthes noted in his collection of essays Mythologies that Einstein had already come to stand—in the public mind—for the whole of science. Barthes was writing at a time when two hospitals were fighting for possession of the late great man's brain.
"Einstein fulfills all the conditions of myth, which could not care less about contradictions so long as it establishes a euphoric security: at once magician and machine, eternal researcher and unfulfilled discoverer, unleashing the best and the worst, brain and conscience, Einstein embodies the most contradictory dreams, and mythically reconciles the infinite power of man over nature with the 'fatality' of the sacrosanct, which man cannot yet do without."
Above all, Barthes concluded, "through the mythology of Einstein, the world blissfully regained the image of knowledge reduced to a formula." The single secret to the world. The philosopher's stone. The transmutation of base metal into gold. The world in a grain of sand. The only equation from physics that lay people actually know. The simple and beautiful e=mc2.
Forty-five years later, Albert Einstein still has the highest recognition factor of any scientist of the modern era . . . Einstein's public image neatly combines the two great popular stereotypes of the scientist in one: the unworldly saint and the dotty sinner. Saint in the sense of the man who selflessly gave us a completely new vision of the universe, and who when he died in 1955 was still working on unified field theory—a theory of everything that would bind together the great forces of quantum physics, relativity theory, gravitation and nuclear power; a theory that would unlock the mysteries of time, space and the universe and in the process maybe solve the mystery of existence. Sinner in the sense of the man whose ideas inspired the ultimate horror—his first Time magazine cover superimposed his mature face on a mushroom cloud, with e=mc2 written on the mushroom.
I don't know who the prevailing single image of the scientist was before him—Newton?
Some people actually read e-books on their phones (and I admire them for it, one must realyy like reading to do it on a phone on subway). And my e-reader is happily full of vintage public domain books from Gutenberg.org
Understood. But I was still the only person in the store with a dead tree!
no subject
Thank you . . .
Well, nuclear physics managed to invent the most deadly weapon yet known... and Einstein is the Genius Incarnate in the collective mind
Christopher Frayling makes just this point (which I don't disagree with) in Mad, Bad and Dangerous? The Scientist and the Cinema (2005), which I was reading before I left for D.C.:
In the same year as Margaret Mead's pioneering survey of schoolchildren's attitudes [toward scientists, 1957], Roland Barthes noted in his collection of essays Mythologies that Einstein had already come to stand—in the public mind—for the whole of science. Barthes was writing at a time when two hospitals were fighting for possession of the late great man's brain.
"Einstein fulfills all the conditions of myth, which could not care less about contradictions so long as it establishes a euphoric security: at once magician and machine, eternal researcher and unfulfilled discoverer, unleashing the best and the worst, brain and conscience, Einstein embodies the most contradictory dreams, and mythically reconciles the infinite power of man over nature with the 'fatality' of the sacrosanct, which man cannot yet do without."
Above all, Barthes concluded, "through the mythology of Einstein, the world blissfully regained the image of knowledge reduced to a formula." The single secret to the world. The philosopher's stone. The transmutation of base metal into gold. The world in a grain of sand. The only equation from physics that lay people actually know. The simple and beautiful e=mc2.
Forty-five years later, Albert Einstein still has the highest recognition factor of any scientist of the modern era . . . Einstein's public image neatly combines the two great popular stereotypes of the scientist in one: the unworldly saint and the dotty sinner. Saint in the sense of the man who selflessly gave us a completely new vision of the universe, and who when he died in 1955 was still working on unified field theory—a theory of everything that would bind together the great forces of quantum physics, relativity theory, gravitation and nuclear power; a theory that would unlock the mysteries of time, space and the universe and in the process maybe solve the mystery of existence. Sinner in the sense of the man whose ideas inspired the ultimate horror—his first Time magazine cover superimposed his mature face on a mushroom cloud, with e=mc2 written on the mushroom.
I don't know who the prevailing single image of the scientist was before him—Newton?
Some people actually read e-books on their phones (and I admire them for it, one must realyy like reading to do it on a phone on subway). And my e-reader is happily full of vintage public domain books from Gutenberg.org
Understood. But I was still the only person in the store with a dead tree!