“Marilyn is beauty; Einstein is intelligence”. This is how French physicist and philosopher Jean Marc Lévy-Leblond defined two world-famous myths of the 20th century.
In 1905 Albert Einstein (1879-1955) published several remarkable papers that would profoundly change physics. But his great fame, that went well beyond the boundaries of the scientific community, came much later, when he developed the general relativity theory and especially when the observation of the deviation of light during a solar eclipse in 1919 finally proved that his revolutionary insights were correct.
An endless series of scientific and non-scientific acknowledgements including a Nobel Prize in 1921 turned Albert Einstein not just into one of the most brilliant scientific minds ever, but into a bona fide icon of his time. Even Einstein could hardly understand why and was often annoyed by that.
Einstein's amazing scientific ideas were developed in a historical, philosophical and cultural environment that focused on innovation and even used it to support philosophical relativism. And this helped create the myth of Einstein, whose face can be found on all sorts of gadgets today, together with his world-famous formula E=mc2, that everybody knows but only a handful of people can actually understand.
By portraying the man and analyzing the myth at the same time, this film helps tell one apart from the other - what Einstein actually said and what he was only rumoured to have said. And in so doing it casts an unusual light over Einstein's figure, drawing on his bountiful personal and scientific correspondence, on contributions by alleged children and real grandchildren of his, and even on those who own marketing rights over his image.