Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein's Brain
Michael Paterniti
Language: English
Pages: 224
ISBN: 038533303X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Albert Einstein's brain floats in a Tupperware bowl in a gray duffel bag in the trunk of a Buick Skylark barreling across America. Driving the car is journalist Michael Paterniti. Sitting next to him is an eighty-four-year-old pathologist named Thomas Harvey, who performed the autopsy on Einstein in 1955 -- then simply removed the brain and took it home. And kept it for over forty years.
On a cold February day, the two men and the brain leave New Jersey and light out on I-70 for sunny California, where Einstein's perplexed granddaughter, Evelyn, awaits. And riding along as the imaginary fourth passenger is Einstein himself, an id-driven genius, the original galactic slacker with his head in the stars. Part travelogue, part memoir, part history, part biography, and part meditation, Driving Mr. Albert is one of the most unique road trips in modern literature.
Einstein was proposing by this thought experiment was the revolutionary idea of a relativistic universe, one no longer governed by an autonomy of laws, but a place where space and time become one thing: space-time, the invisible Mylar fabric of the new cosmos. In attempts to extend this concept to encompass all of physics, and most particularly gravitation, Einstein then went to work on what, in 1916, would become the general theory of relativity. Reinventing Newton's theory of universal
he hisses. "And the other book." Waves the Bible, almost as an afterthought. A call from Peoria. A call from Des Moines. The devil's everywhere. Responding to Pete from Tallahassee, who has just been successfully exorcised of Satan, Bob Larson sets out his agenda for America, one predicated on the destruction of all heavy-metal music and the obliteration of Marilyn Manson. As well as booming sales of his book, In the Name of Satan. "Are you with me?" asks Bob Larson. "Do you believe in the
transportation by air." And then he worries over the world's uranium supplies: "The United States has only very poor area of uranium [sic] in moderate quantities. There is some good ore in Canada and the former Czechoslovakia, while the most important source of uranium is Belgian Congo." When the letter was delivered to Roosevelt, the President at first responded slowly but soon realized the gravity of the situation—if the Americans had just thought to build a bomb, perhaps the Nazis, with great
sweater and blue turtleneck and blue jeans. Mr. Blue—beaming. "Yessir, real good to see you," he says. He holds my hand tightly, pulls himself close, then fades by (his shorter leg again). Cleora is there, too, struggling a bit with her injury, taking a bone strengthener called Fosamax, but generally in fine spirits and determined to be the consummate hostess she is. I forgot how kind a face she has. We climb back up the stairs together, then Harvey shuttles down again to fetch Cleora—"Okay,
later, living in New Mexico, I struck up a friendship with my landlord, a man named Steven, who randomly happened to be friends with the writer William Burroughs. A veteran of all things cool and outre, Steven often watered the flower garden in his adobe compound where I lived. When I told him about Einstein's brain, he didn't even blink. "Yeah, the guy with the brain lives next to William in Lawrence, Kansas," he said. I thought he was putting me on. "He what?" I said. "Yeah," he said. "He