Albert Einstein, the genius on the screen

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When you think of the iconic image of a scientist, Einstein's face is likely to spring to mind. If you do the simple test of searching for the term ‘scientist’ in the Google images section, most of the results will show an older gentleman with tousled white hair, a moustache, and glasses. There are also photographs of Einstein himself, such as the classic one of him sticking out his tongue.

Described by many as the greatest mind of the 20th century, this iconic scientist has been immortalised on screen on numerous occasions, although most of these have been in the field of comedy, without dealing with aspects of his biography or scientific output, possibly because of the frivolous image of a dishevelled and somewhat mad scientist.

There are documentaries in different languages that deal with his life, his discoveries, and his influence on modern science, such as Einstein's Universe (1979), The Extraordinary Genius of Albert Einstein (2010), The Myth of Einstein: The Life and Work of a Rebel (2015), Einstein et la Relativité Générale, une histoire singulière (2015), Albert Einstein: l'homme et le génie (2015), Chasing Einstein (2019), The Time Factory (2021) or Einstein and the Bomb (2024).

Analyzing the chronology of the different television appearances, especially in films, of this great scientist, we can observe an evolution from comedy to a more serious treatment of his life and discoveries.

Here are just a few, but I'm sure many more could be added.

Insignificance (1985)

Albert Einstein is in New York to give a talk on his latest work. In the evening, when he returns to his hotel, he finds Marilyn Monroe in his room. The actress and the scientist start chatting about subjects as diverse as the theory of relativity, sex, and politics. Things get complicated when Senator McCarthy and Joe DiMaggio, one of Marilyn's ex-husbands, burst into the room.

The Young Einstein (1988)

A wacky comedy in which the physicist is introduced as the son of an Australian farmer, inventor of the electric guitar and rock and roll, who has an affair with Marie Curie while saving the world from nuclear disaster. The film was a box-office flop.

The Genius of Love (1994)

This was the title given to the film in Spain, but it was originally called I.Q. In this film, the legendary scientist Albert Einstein abandons his physics theories for a while to find the perfect man for his intellectual niece, Catherine. The chosen one is Ed, an attractive mechanic who is a regular reader of science magazines. However, the girl, who is already engaged, shows no interest in Ed, so Einstein, with the help of his scientific colleagues, does everything he can to turn the mechanic into an eminent physicist.

Artificial Intelligence (2001)

In the film, a holographic Einstein under the name of Dr. Know (and the voice of Robin Williams with an impostured German accent), answers the questions of the protagonists as an oracle.

The hologram represents his best-known image with tousled white hair, glasses and his abundant moustache.

Einstein and Eddington

It is in this feature film that we find that science takes on the greatest weight in the plot. It tells the story of Albert Einstein's development of the theory of general relativity and his relationship with the British scientist Sir Arthur Eddington, the first physicist to experimentally prove his ideas.

Genius (2017)

On 25 April 2017, National Geographic premiered Genius, a television series that looks at the life of Albert Einstein, from his youth, when he worked in a patent office, to his maturity when he was already a world-renowned physicist for his theory of relativity. Although this is not the first time that the German physicist has been portrayed on the small and big screen, the truth is that, despite his importance, there are hardly any approaches that delve deeper into his research and go beyond his iconic image as a scientist.

With the question: what if you spent your life searching for something that might not exist, this documentary introduces Einstein's vision of gravity as having been responsible for defining the human concept of the universe. Following the advice of some of the world's leading scientists, including Nobel Prize winners, this documentary tries to discover what lies behind some of the most fascinating experiments that have been carried out to unravel the mysteries of the universe (including LIGO, CERN, and XENON 1T).

Oppenheimer: the atomic bomb dilemma (2023)

With the phrase: ‘Now it is your turn to deal with the consequences of your achievement’, physicist Albert Einstein says to his colleague Robert Oppenheimer in one of the last final scenes of the film that tells how the latter became in the 1940s the ‘father’ of the atomic bomb by leading the US government's Manhattan Project.

In the film, Einstein appears in the last stage of his life, when he shared the spaces of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton with Oppenheimer, who was director of the institution from 1947 to 1966.

They were two of the most important scientists of their time, but they had important differences, both in how they understood physics and how they believed their research could serve - or harm - the world.

‘We were close colleagues and somewhat friends,’ Oppenheimer told a conference in Paris in 1965, marking the tenth anniversary of Einstein's death.

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