Had he not had that wild halo of hair and those piercing eyes, would he still have become science’s poster boy? Had he lacked that admixture of intensity and distraction, would he nevertheless have become such an icon, his face a symbol and his name a synonym for genius?
Suppose, as a thought experiment, that he had looked like Max Planck or Niels Bohr. Would he have remained in their reputational orbit—a mere scientific genius? Or would he still have made the quantum leap into the realm inhabited by Aristotle, Galileo, and Newton?
As we seek to determine Albert Einstein’s proper place in history’s pantheon, we can look at how he became paramount in both the field of science and the field of celebrity. And from this duality—surely genius can be both wave and particle too—we can speculate about a unified theory that would explain the interaction between the fields.
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