By Dr. Robert Thorson

Albert Einstein’s 100th year is being celebrated in science departments throughout the world. This centennial is neither of his birth in 1879 nor of his death in 1955, but of a single year of astonishing scientific productivity. In 1905, Einstein published five articles that opened the floodgates of modern physical science.

Though it runs counter to conventional wisdom, I suggest that the normally self-effacing Einstein is a poor model for everyday career achievement in science today, which depends as much on managerial and political skills as it does on insight and analytical intelligence. Einstein stands alone as an ideal model for true scientific genius, but not for mere mortals like me.

Following his prolific year of publishing in the prestigious Annalen der Physik, Einstein was rejected for a job as a university lecturer. He then applied for a job as a high school teacher and was rejected once again. Finally, he resumed his job in a Swiss government patent office, which fortunately gave him time for thinking rather than climbing the career fast track.

Einstein’s celebrity would not come until 1919, when his then 2- year-old paper on general relativity – – which postulated that space and time were woven together — gripped the physics establishment. In 1921, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the photoelectric effect and for earlier work on the speed of light, the equivalence of mass and energy (E=mc2), early quantum theory and Brownian motion. His fame grew as a German-Jewish refugee from World War II Europe, a professor at Princeton University’s Institute for Advanced Studies, a pacifist, then finally as a cultural icon.

Einstein’s early career story is remarkably different from that of most young scientists working today. His contributions came straight from his brain and writing implement, without the support of and encumbrances associated with the modern science establishment. He was the sole author of the path-breaking article on special relativity, which wasn’t funded by grants and which didn’t cite any other influential work. These were unambiguously Einstein’s ideas and words. He alone was responsible for the potential contributions and errors. Today, most papers are multiauthored, in part because science has become more of a cooperative business. Papers in the “big-science” fields of biomedical research, marine science and astronomy often list 10 or 12 contributors, making it hard to know who wrote what, who developed the original ideas, who collected the data, who garnered the funding and who advised the student. It’s also easier for scientific misconduct to rear its ugly head.

The leading scientists today whom I admire spend much of their time as officers of professional organizations, editors of journals, lobbyists for federal funding, ambassadors to industry, managers of grants and operators of expensive equipment. All are smart and have had original ideas that made a difference. But what makes them stand out are the people skills required to cope with the enormously complicated social enterprise called science. They can fund a lab, fill it with bright students, keep the administrators at bay, manage the cycle of grant renewals like an accountant and keep an eye on their collegial friends and competitors. They learned this from experience, having lived in such a world as graduate students, post- docs, research associates and so forth.

Ironically, Einstein’s fame was enhanced by his working alone. His early papers received little notice because few of his peers could understand them. In a now famous remark, British astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington told a journalist that he had trouble thinking of anyone who understood relativity other than Einstein and himself. The inability of others to grasp Einstein’s theories was exaggerated by the press, thereby creating the myth of the super-smart scientist, one whose intelligence was too high to be comprehended. This myth intensified as Einstein’s unusual appearance (wild hair, drooping mustache) and quirky habits (pacifist politics, violin playing, bicycle riding) became the featured attraction, rather than his scientific achievements.

It was the novelty of Einstein’s now century-old ideas that launched his celebrity. But it was his mythological attributes — underdog-turned-superhuman — that made Einstein a household name.