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Einstein show at Natural History Museum

By FREDERICK M. WINSHIP
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NEW YORK, Nov. 15 (UPI) -- The first major museum show devoted to the life and scientific discoveries of physicist Albert Einstein (1879-1955) opened Friday at the American Museum of Natural History prior to a 3-year international tour that will mark the 100th anniversary of his Special Theory of Relativity.

Museum officials say the are expecting record crowds in the hundreds of thousands to view the show before it closes Aug. 10 to move on to the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles and the Bloomfield Science Museum in Jerusalem. The show will inaugurate the Skirball Center's Heritage Hall, an exhibition gallery now under construction in the Santa Monica Hills, in 2004.

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The show will arrive at the Bloomfield Museum, an independent facility operated by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, in time for the 2005 centennial of the theory of relativity, which is being observed with special events worldwide. The university is the repository for Einstein's archives and a major contributor of displays in the exhibition.

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The show has been designed for large crowds and provides outsized illuminated information panels with print large enough to be read from a distance, a plethora of interactive digital devices that also provide information and demonstrate scientific theories, and a video theater for a documentary on Einstein narrated by Alan Alda.

It is a handsome show designed to delight -- and educate -- audiences of all ages and particularly high school science students who will be attending it in large numbers and using the special learning lab manned by trained Einstein "explainers."

Exhibits range from Einstein's school report cards, his favorite pipes, his recordings of violin concertos (he was an amateur violinist), his German passport, and his 1921 Nobel Prize medal to his most important scientific manuscripts and correspondences with President Franklin D. Roosevelt about possibilities of an atomic bomb.

There are family photographs and depictions of him at all ages, including a fine 1921 oil portrait by Hermann Struck and a monumental bronze sculpture created this year by Robert Berks for the National Academy of Sciences. They show that his hair, which became a fright-white halo in later life, was always unruly, a style he attributed to "neglect." He also often forgot to wear stockings.

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But the forgetful professor is also the man who in one year, 1905, referred to in the show as his "annus mirabilis" (miracle year), put forward four history-making scientific theories while working as a clerk in a Swiss patent office. One of them was that mass and energy are different forms of the same thing, a discovery that led more than 40 years later to atomic fission and the development of nuclear weaponry.

Einstein did not become famous outside scientific circles until a 1919 eclipse of the sun documented deflection of starlight by the sun's gravity, proving his theory that gravity is created by objects warping the fabric of space-time, the fourth dimension. The show demonstrates how Einstein's theories are still being used by scientists to make fresh scientific breakthroughs.

There is documentation of Einstein's work on the photoelectric effect, leading to the development of vacuum tubes, integrated circuits, television, and eventually to the computer revolution. Also touched on is how his explanation of Brownian motion created a new understanding of molecules that helped unlock the secrets of DNA, today's most exciting area of science.

The final section of the show is devoted to ongoing attempts to describe all physical phenomena under the umbrella of Einstein's Grand Unified Theory, his most thrilling idea but one he was never able to prove. This may be a difficult concept for the lay viewer to understand, but there is plenty in the show about theories that are not only demonstrable but open to explanation in understandable terms.

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"You can get a lot out of this show, even if you flunked high school physics," museum president Ellen V. Futter told United Press International at a preview of the show. "And you get the chance to come face to face with one of the most brilliant minds the world has ever seen and share moments of sheer intellectual splendor."

Some of the Einstein findings covered in simplified terms is why the speed of light (186,282 miles per second) is the universe's speed limit and why time is not absolute but relative to a frame of reference. There are exhibits that illustrate how Einstein's Theory of Relativity led to the discovery about 30 years ago of black holes that are the result of collapsed stars, a sci-fi nightmare become reality.

The public Einstein -- crusader against war, Nazi racism, and McCarthyism, and defender of civil rights and the Jewish homeland in Israel -- is delineated by many interesting exhibits that traces his journey from Berlin, where he was a professor from 1914 to 1932 to his final home in Princeton, N.J. He became a U.S. citizen in 1940, but was denied government security clearance that would have enabled him to work on the atomic Manhattan Project because he was considered left-wing.

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There are letters in which Einstein admitted supporting many aspects of Socialism and expressed fear that capitalism was capable of "crippling an individual." The FBI had a 15,000-page dossier on him. Yet he is one of the most admired men who ever lived and was accorded the Time magazine cover for its millennium issue, naming him "Person of the Century."

The show at the American Museum of Natural History confirms Time's evaluation, as a souvenir of the event there is a new publication, "The Einstein Scrapbook," (Johns Hopkins University Press, 176 pages, $22.50).

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