Inside The Mind Of Einstein

Albert Einstein's wife, the story goes, was asked by a reporter if she understood her husband's general theory of relativity.

"No," she replied. "He tries to explain it to me all the time. But I don't think it's essential to my happiness."

Amen. But nearly a half-century after his death, Einstein and his ideas continue to fascinate us. And an exhibit opening Friday at the American Museum of Natural History presents an attractive introduction to his science and life.

Organizers say that even a child of 10 or 12 can learn some science here, while others can gain an appreciation of Einstein's influence on history. It will take an attentive child, and one who likes to learn mind-bending stuff, to pick up much of Einstein's ideas. But a kid like that should have fun here.

One highlight is a chance to see documents that are being presented for the first time in the United States, like pages from Einstein's handwritten manuscripts. There's something enthralling about seeing a version of "E equals MC squared" from 1912 in Einstein's tiny handwriting. There's also something endearing about seeing that he originally wrote an "L" instead of an "E," and then changed his mind and scratched it out. Even Einstein had second thoughts.

Elsewhere, visitors can see his 1921 Nobel Prize. And near the end of the exhibit is his last writing pad, with line upon line of equations that trace his final, unsuccessful attempts to produce a single theory that describes both gravitation and electromagnetism. Scientists are still trying to achieve that.

Not all the exhibit is about science. Large panels of text and graphics describe Einstein's dedication to causes like pacifism, some aspects of socialism, nuclear disarmament and a single world government. We read about his troubled family life, including a bitter divorce - after he started a love affair with his cousin - that left him estranged from two sons. We see a facsimile of a letter to his wife that lists conditions under which he would agree to remain married to her.

But much of the exhibit, of course, is about his science.

After all, it was Einstein who declared that light is made up of particles, that it is bent by gravity, and that its speed is the same whether it comes out of a stop sign or the headlight of a hurtling train. He showed that matter can be converted to energy, a trick that makes the sun shine. He recognized gravity as the result of a warping in space and time. And he realized that time doesn't pass at a uniform rate universally.

The exhibition tells us that a moving clock ticks more slowly than a stationary one, and a Soviet astronaut who spent 748 days in the space station Mir is now one-fiftieth of a second younger as a result.

Pretty heady stuff, but the exhibition does an impressive job at explaining it. Animations show why a moving clock ticks more slowly than one standing still. And visitors can move a "black hole" around on a video screen, watching it bend light and distort the image behind it.

When visitors walk near an illuminated wall, they can see an animation of their mass disturbing the entity known as space-time, the distortion Einstein said causes gravity. And in a demonstration area, they can see the same idea by rolling balls across a flexible sheet.

This exhibition won't give you a Ph.D. But even if you fled from physics classes in high school and college, it's a beguiling way to learn from one of the great minds of the 20th century.

By Malcolm Ritter