Albert Einstein

No one changed the fundamental landscape of physics more than Albert Einstein. Before Einstein, space and time were fixed, and separate. Einstein showed they were elastic, and intertwined. Before Einstein, solid matter was different from insubstantial energy. But Einstein showed they were the same, and matter could melt into energy, according to E=mc2. Before Einstein, gravity was considered a force, like electricity. He showed it was the warping of space-time into an unseen fourth dimension.

Edward A. Frieman, a leading figure in American science for decades as a researcher with wide-ranging interests, a top-level governmental advisor on defense and energy issues, and director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, has died. He was 87. Frieman died April 11 at UCSD's Thornton Hospital in La Jolla of a respiratory illness, the university announced. His legacy extends to leadership posts in academia, government and private industry. There are "not many like him, and he will be sorely missed," said John Deutch, professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and former CIA director and deputy secretary of Defense.

SOME coffee table books are more important than others. Magnes Press of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has just issued "Albert Einstein: The Persistent Illusion of Transience," containing an amazing collection of documents and photographs. In this enterprise the university has an edge: Einstein bequeathed his personal and scientific papers to it, and they are housed in its Albert Einstein Archives.

Albert Einstein has been dead for nearly 60 years, relatively speaking, and he's still being tested. Theoretically, at least. General relativity, the theory for which the German-born theoretical physicist is best known, holds up even in the more outlying phenomena of distant space, scientists have found. Astronomers studied a neutron star about 7,000 light years from Earth that is twice as heavy as our sun but only about 12 miles in diameter. The gravity of this spinning, highly magnetic star, or pulsar, is about 300 billion times stronger than the force that's holding your feet to the ground.

Albert Einstein, brilliant theorist, king of the atom, regretful father of The Bomb . . . and master of 101 Jewish jokes. "Most people don't know that about him, but he was a real comedian, or at least wanted to be one," said Ed Metzger, who brings his one-man show, "Albert Einstein: The Practical Bohemian," to Saddleback College in Mission Viejo on Saturday. "When I began researching my play, I talked to one of his sons, who didn't really give me a lot of good information at first.

What if Albert Einstein had been murdered? What if one of the greatest minds of this century, the man credited with tearing the veil from the mystery of physics, had not died relatively peacefully in a hospital in Princeton in 1955, but had been poisoned? Such is the premise of Todd Gitlin's first novel, "The Murder of Albert Einstein," and it opens a Pandora's box of questions: Who would have done such a thing to a benign 76-year-old gentleman?

Time is relative, Albert Einstein said, so let's say it's summer. And you've traveled south on the Jersey Turnpike at better than the speed of light, evaded the troopers and the constraints of chronology, and found yourself in Princeton, which has a university and once had Einstein. It still has a university, but today it has Walter Matthau. And history seems to be in flux.

You can gauge a celebrity's popularity by the value of his or her John Hancock. For instance, a signed photograph of then-teen singer Debbie Gibson sold for up to $95 a few years ago. "Today you can have her for $20," memorabilia dealer William W. Miller said. "It's like playing the stock market." That's why his store, the Odyssey Gallery in Newport Beach's Fashion Island, specializes in personalities of the less ephemeral variety.

Ed Metzger has stopped buying Albert Einstein biographies. He saw a new one in Barnes & Noble recently--a 700-page tome on the famed physicist. He flipped through it. Nothing new. No reason to tinker with his one-man show, "Einstein: The Practical Bohemian." Over the last 18 years, Metzger has evolved into a living, breathing Einstein biography. His 90-minute one-man show, which he'll perform at the CSUN Performing Arts Center at 8 p.m.

This has to be a mistake. There, on the Borders shelf, packed with weighty physics volumes, lies a slick little book titled "Driving Mr. Albert." Its cover shows the rear end of a Buick with the license plate "E=MC2." Its plot is bizarre: Young man drives cross-country with old doctor who stole Einstein's brain 45 years ago and never gave it back. They roll westward with the sliced-and-diced brain in a Tupperware bowl in a gray duffel bag in the Buick's trunk.

Bidding has started on eBay for Einstein's "God Letter" -- a handwritten letter from Albert Einstein in which he is very frank about his feelings on religion. "The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses," the physicist wrote in German in the 1954 letter addressed to the Jewish philosopher Eric B. Gutkind.  Einstein goes on to refer to the Bible as "a collection of honorable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish.

Einstein's Mistakes The Human Failings of Genius Hans C. Ohanian W.W. Norton: 394 pp., $24.95 When Donald Crowhurst's abandoned sailboat was found adrift in the Atlantic in 1969, his captain's log recorded the ravings of a man whose mind had snapped. On page after page, he spouted fulminations and pseudoscience, finally ripping his chronometer from its mountings and throwing it and then himself into the drink.

Scientists and artists may seem worlds apart, but in his deceptively breezy 1993 hit, "Picasso at the Lapin Agile," writer-actor-comic Steve Martin looked past their surface differences in search of more fundamental common ground. Rubicon Theatre Company's smart, spirited revival wraps passionate philosophical inquiry in the entertaining, accessible gauze of Martin's giddy comic salute to the artistic, intellectual and cultural accomplishments of the 20th century.

SOME coffee table books are more important than others. Magnes Press of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has just issued "Albert Einstein: The Persistent Illusion of Transience," containing an amazing collection of documents and photographs. In this enterprise the university has an edge: Einstein bequeathed his personal and scientific papers to it, and they are housed in its Albert Einstein Archives.

I bet you're reading this at work -- and feeling guilty about it. Rest easy. You are not alone. A recent survey found that the typical American worker wastes slightly more than two hours a day, not including lunch and scheduled breaks. The insurance industry is particularly rife with time wasters (can you blame them?) and Missouri, for reasons not entirely clear, is the state with the highest percentage of slackers. The No.

IN late 19th century Munich, the multivolume "Popular Books on Natural Science" was required bookcase furniture in middle-class German homes, and its ebullient author, Aaron Bernstein, was the Carl Sagan of his day. "Praised be this science!" he cried. "Praised be the men who do it! And praised be the human mind, which sees more sharply than does the human eye." It seemed the perfect gift for a 10-year-old boy who (contrary to later legend) was doing quite well in school.

Police have recovered manuscripts by Albert Einstein from two youngsters caught breaking into Israel's National Library at Hebrew University, the library director said Sunday. The radio said the youngsters, caught Friday night when the break-in sounded an alarm, were placed under house arrest while police investigated whether they acted alone or on behalf of a collector or dealer.

To get better acquainted with Albert Einstein, visit the Online Einstein Museum that features history, photos and voice clips about the physicist who set the agenda for science in the 20th century. The address is: http://www.aip.org/history/einstein

THE year was 1915. War and privation had come to Germany. Meanwhile, in Berlin, a solitary man struggled with the equations for a new theory of gravity. "I have been laboring inhumanly," Albert Einstein, then 36, wrote to a friend in his native German. "I am quite overworked."

Dec. 28, 1930: Pasadena planned to go to great lengths to please a famous visitor, The Times reported. "When Dr. Albert Einstein arrives here New Year's Day, he will receive the most unusual tribute ever accorded a distinguished guest by any American city -- he will be left alone," the newspaper said. "The famous physicist's hosts, Arthur H. Fleming, president of the board of trustees of the California Institute of Technology, and Henry M.