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Celebrating Einstein’s "miraculous year"
Arts and Sciences Libraries constructs online exhibit to recognize physicist
By PATRICIA DONOVAN
Contributing Editor
The Arts and Sciences Libraries have constructed an online exhibit celebrating Albert Einstein's life and achievements with links to manuscripts and papers, scientific articles, related news and events, biographic data, photographs and audio-visual materials, games and thought experiments, as well as to a site designed to help kids think like physicists.
The exhibit, at http://ublib.buffalo.edu/libraries/asl/exhibits/einstein/, was mounted because 2005 marks the 100th anniversary of Einstein's "miraculous year"—1905—when he published seminal papers on relativity, the photoelectric effect and "Brownian motion" that continue to influence all of modern physics.
The United Nations has declared 2005 "The International Year of Physics," and in Germany several major scientific outreach events are planned for what is being called "The Einstein Year."
The UB exhibition, which is updated regularly, was produced by David Bertuca, assistant librarian. Among other things, it offers a link to the Albert Einstein Archives, which Bertuca says, contains "Everything imaginable on the man and his works, including kid's pages and a page of sound files and video clips.
"We also link to the Einstein Archives Online, which includes hundreds of pages of manuscripts, papers and documents that are available digitally, along with photographs and other items," Bertuca notes.
The UB site will take visitors to the Einstein Papers Project at the California Institute of Technology, to the special German Einstein-Year Web site, to the Public Broadcasting Service's Einstein Web site (with additional sources and links) and to Germany's Einstein Forum.
"If you think something can't be serious unless it's boring," Bertuca says, "you haven't been to the Einstein Forum."
The exhibit also connects to discussion forums and secondary resources, including the Nobel Prize official site on relativity and the American Museum of Natural History. Bertuca says there are pages on the PBS site that offer time-traveling games and use animation and text to help you "think like Einstein.'
"We also offer sites that discuss what Einstein invented, his 'twin paradox' time dilation experiments, and to 'Einstein for Kids,' which presents great learning materials for children."