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What has aroused Einsteinophiles especially is a 12-ft.-high bronze statue of the physicist that will be unveiled in April by the National Academy of Sciences on Washington's Constitution Avenue. Critics have attacked Sculptor Robert Berks for his "bubble gum" style, the astrological connotation of the star-studded base and the statue's cost (at least $1.6 million). Others insist that no statue could really be appropriate; Einstein, after all, was so opposed to posthumous veneration that he willed his ashes to be scattered at an undisclosed place. Constantly called upon to pose for photographers, painters and sculptors (including Berks), he once gave his occupation as "artist's model."
Perhaps the most meaningful tribute to Einstein is entirely unplanned: the renaissance of interest in his scientific work. Before his death in 1955 at 76, Einstein had called himself a "museum piece," a fossil who had long since slipped out of the mainstream of physics. Indeed, his greatest work, general relativity, fell into an intellectual limbo. Explains University of Texas Physicist John Wheeler: "For the first half-century of its life, general relativity was a theorist's paradise but an experimentalist's hell. No theory was more difficult to test." Physicists turned to other concepts, mostly concerning atomic structure, that could be more easily verified and had more applications.
Now that view has undergone a dramatic change. Says West German Physicist Carl Friedrich von Weizsacker: "Einstein's true greatness lies in the fact that he remains relevant today, in spite of the breakthroughs that have occurred since his death." Indeed, it is many of those breakthroughs that have contributed to the Einstein revival.
Since the early 1960s, astronomers have been opening up an entirely new universe, aided by technology only vaguely dreamed of in Einstein's day: giant radio antennas that can "see" hitherto unknown sources of energy in space, orbiting satellites that scan the heavens high above the obscuring atmosphere, and atomic clocks so accurate they lose or gain barely a billionth of a second in a month.
This unexpected world includes enigmatic objects called quasars.
Radiating prodigious amounts of energy, they are visible on earth despite the fact that they may be the most distant objects in the universe. Pulsars, or neutron stars, have also been detected; these highly compressed cadavers of massive stars usually signal their existence by their highly regular radio beeps. Even stranger are the giant stars that may have in effect gone down the cosmic drain: those elusive black holes, with gravitational fields so powerful that not even light can escape them. Astronomers have also picked up what may be the echo of the Creation. Coming from everywhere in the skies, and in a sense from nowhere at all, these faint microwaves appear to be the lingering reverberations of the Big Bang, the cataclysmic explosion in which the universe was apparently born 15 billion to 20 billion years ago.
Einstein, in his time, could have had