Nutty professor or one cool dude?

This Einstein fathered an illegitimate daughter, divorced his first wife and later married his cousin, all the while carrying on more or less open affairs with the “ladies [who] swarmed around him like moonlets circling a planet,” as Time put it in naming him its Person of the 20th Century. (Legend has it that Marilyn Monroe said Einstein was her idea of a sexy man.)

This Einstein is a natural for today’s bloggossip world, a dashing young man about town, easily accessible to the paparazzi as he lives the life of the mind by day and the life of the rake after dark. He is a tabloid dream.

‘Polarizing effect on young scholars’
He is also, perhaps, an opportunity squandered.

When physics organizations decided to mark the centennial of Einstein’s blindingly brilliant work of 1905, they said one of their main goals was to attract students into physics. “The general public’s awareness of physics and its importance in our daily life is decreasing,” says the European Physical Society, the international coordinator of the Einstein Year. “The number of physics students has declined dramatically.”

Reuters file Einstein attracted the attentions of starstruck young women all his life. Marilyn Monroe was reputed to have said she found him sexy.

So physicists latched onto the iconic image of Einstein as a way to get the attention of science students. “You rarely get a chance to have a cultural icon that’s so closely aligned with the message you want to deliver and who has become sort of timeless,” said Tobin, of Brogan & Partners.

Overwhelmingly, however, the icon most of these organizations chose was the old Einstein. Where is the young, cool Einstein?

“The most persistent myth about Einstein is that he was born at the age of 50,” said Michel Janssen, a science and technology historian at the University of Minnesota who edited several volumes of Einstein’s collected papers. He was quoting a favorite saying of John Stachel, the founding editor of the Einstein Papers Project.

The image of the wild-haired professor at Princeton as the talisman of genius is ineffective, said Jeetendr Sehdev, a brand strategist for Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide, the New York-based advertising and public relations conglomerate, who said the “iconic image has a polarizing effect on young scholars considering studying physics.”

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“Some students pride themselves on being ‘Young Einsteins,’ but other students are turned off by the images’ unfashionable and stodgy appeal,” Sehdev said.

But Tobin argues that trying to reshape Einstein’s image could muddy his universally recognized brand, which is a proven winner. It runs “the risk of trying to take an icon and pull him out of icon status.”

The old Einstein “is what we now associate with brilliance and what we associate with the breakthrough ideas,” he added. “I think you run the risk of losing the effectiveness of the image in an ad.”

Sehdev, who researches the youth market, acknowledged the universality of the old Einstein and said the image could still be powerful if used the right way. But he would hedge his bets by exploiting ignorance about Einstein as a young man.

He suggested a possible marketing campaign to freshen up the Albert Einstein™ brand:

“‘You think you know what Einstein was about? Well, here’s the reality.’”

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