The Einstein Effect

May 8, 2023
This animated survey by Cohen (My Jesus Year), the social media manager for the Albert Einstein Estate, explores how the physicist’s legacy reverberates through contemporary technology and pop culture. Highlighting Einstein’s contributions to modern gadgetry, Cohen describes how he briefly became an Uber driver to better understand GPS, which is enabled by a mathematical model devised by Einstein, and explains how Einstein’s novel ideas about light paved the way for remote control technology. Elsewhere, Cohen delves into the public’s ongoing fascination with the scientist by meeting the doctor who owns the sliced-up remnants of Einstein’s brain and an artifact dealer who collects locks of the Nobel Prize winner’s hair, musing that such relics offer “those who can’t actually be somebody” a piece of greatness. Cohen also converses with actor Mandy Patinkin—the spokesperson for the International Rescue Committee, which Einstein founded—about the physicist’s activism on behalf of Jewish people during WWII. General readers will appreciate the simple explanations of Einstein’s innovations (“The essence of the special theory of relativity... is that time is affected by speed”), and the wacky trivia amuses (Einstein sometimes wore flannel pajamas and shuffled “around his neighborhood like a Jewish Hugh Hefner”). It’s a diverting tribute to Einstein’s lasting influence.