Last night I went to the Skirball Cultural Center to check out an exhibit on Einstein. 2005 is the centenary of Einstein’s annus mirabilis, or “miracle year,” where in 1905, he came up with three of his most important scientific theories. In addition to this exhibit, Scientific American has a special Einstein feature in this month’s issue, so expect to see a lot of goings on regarding to good ol’ Albert in the upcoming months.
The exhibit was VERY interesting. They had many original documents on display; scientific documents, love letters he wrote, the letters he wrote to FDR … and letters that children wrote to him. One such letter goes:
“Dear Professor Einstein, I want to know what is beyond the sky. My mother said you could tell me.”
They also had interactive installations that expressed his theories so one could get a hands-on approach. And they had his FBI file on display. It was very interesting to read the notes that Hoover wrote on Einstein and get a glimpse of the paranoid environment of the McCarthy era.
One thing about the exhibit that I really liked was how it really brought out Einstein’s emotional side; we so often see his scientist side, but rarely do we see who the real person was. His love letters were quite passionate. One excerpt in a letter he wrote to his first wife was particularly funny; leave it to Einstein to work physics into a love letter:
“My dear kitten, I just read a wonderful paper on the generation of cathode rays by ultraviolet light.”
I think that a lot of people get the impression that Einstein was an absent-minded professor whose mind was always on physics, but this wasn’t the case. He was apparently quite fond of children, and had a playful side. He liked to sit on his front porch in Princeton and wear his fuzzy slippers.
I also learned this tidbit:
Cosmonaut Sergei Avdeyev spent a total of 748 days on the Russian space station Mir during three separate missions. Because Mir was moving relative to Earth, it was also a time machine. Avdeyev is 0.02 seconds younger than he would have been had he never traveled in space.
(taken from this website)
Anyway, the exhibit runs until May 2005, so if you are in LA, I highly recommend it. It’s FREE every Thursday from 5 PM to 9 PM!
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