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| A version of this essay appeared in New Scientist, July 5, 1997 Call Me “Hair Einstein” . . . . . . . . . . . . . By David Brittan WHEN A CONGRESS of the world’s top physicists sat for a formal portrait in Brussels in 1927, they proved that scientific geniuses could not only think good but look good. The photo is a gallery of careful grooming as practiced by eminent professionals of the day. Some attendees have gone in for the proper and austere—the Kaiser Wilhelm crewcut of Paul Ehrenfest, the businesslike side part of Irving Langmuir, the geometric fringe of Max Planck. Others have gone in for a more dashing look—Erwin Schrödinger a suave back-combed ’do, Niels Bohr a sleek Valentino. But the point is, all have gone in for something. Or all but one. I’m sure the question was on the minds of the assembled physicists as they stared past the head of the attendee seated front row and center, and I’m sure they were too polite to ask it at the time, so I will ask it now: What was the deal with Einstein’s hair? People often imagine the scraggly fright wig to be a side effect of genius, the way the buzzcut is a side effect of military conscription or the bad perm is a side effect of lounge singing. But the Brussels photo shows among Einstein’s peers a prevailing standard of spiffiness. He himself is clearly the exception. If the other physicists’ hair can be said to have achieved a state of equilibrium, Einstein’s hair is all brownian motion. Only Madame Curie’s hard-to-manage hair, which seems on the verge of liberating itself from a bun, comes close to matching his for sheer anarchy. To judge from this and many other photos of twentieth-century physicists, Einstein not only invented “Einstein hair” but was its sole practitioner in his lifetime. The external processes of Einstein’s head, like the internal ones, are among the mysteries of modern physics. The most obvious, but least satisfying, explanation for his anomalous grooming is that he was simply a slob. It would be easy to chalk up the wild hair to the famously casual attitude Einstein displayed toward other niceties of appearance. Socks, for example. Asked why he never wore any, he replied, “When I was young I found out that the big toe always ends up making a hole in the sock. So I stopped wearing socks.” One could envision Einstein shunning haircuts for equally pragmatic reasons (“It keeps growing back,” for example). But that view does not square with the evidence: Einstein’s hair, at least in photos from his maturity, always seems to stay about the same length. While you never see Einstein fashionably shorn, you never see him looking like Willie Nelson either. He, or somebody, must have been cutting that hair, and fairly regularly. But with what? Their teeth? A Weed Whacker? Did Einstein walk into the barber shop and say, “Just a little off the sides, then mop the floor with my head, please”? Whatever the actual mechanism, it seems likely that the Einstein look would have been impossible to sustain without the conscious application of energy, and not just from an electric socket. Another tempting explanation is that Einstein was so out of touch with fashion that he saw nothing unusual about a hairstyle that could serve as a nesting ground for migratory birds. But that illusion could not have lasted long, thanks to the candid feedback he received from his adopted American public. A resident of Cleveland wrote in 1945 to complain that Einstein was a “Big Wig, with more hair than brains.” From Philadelphia, one Ann G. Kocin wrote, in what appears to be paint, “I am a little girl of six. I saw your picture in the paper. I think you ought to have your hair cut, so you can look better.” Another writer pointed to Einstein’s hair as a corrupting influence: “My brother, who is now 16, refuses to get haircuts. He is an admirer of yours and replies to urging that maybe he will grow up to be an Einstein. I have wagered that as a youth you got haircuts in due season and I will appreciated it greatly if you can let us know whether you did or not.” THE TRUTH IS that Einstein did get haircuts as a young man—but not in due season, according to experts on the grooming habits of theoretical physicists. Sharon, of Technicuts, a hair salon on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, recently noted that a photo of Einstein at 17 showed “a great head of hair” that was a little overgrown. Studying a wedding portrait taken a few years later, Sharon concluded that “he hasn’t had his hair cut recently. It looks like he just combed it and let it air-dry.” Stephen, Sharon’s associate, placed the acme of Einstein’s tonsorial achievement in 1912, the year the physicist embarked on a romantic relationship with his cousin Elsa, whom he married in 1919. “Pretty freshly cut,” Stephen said of a sculpted, lightly oiled coiffure. “A straight razor did a nice job on the sideburns. The mustache looks pretty good, too. I’d say he’s got a good haircut.” Sharon agreed, adding: “The frizzies look under control.” Ah, amour. By 1921, his greatest haircut behind him, Einstein had begunto look like a homeless person again. And by 1947, the year of the famous brooding portrait that is often paired with an image of a mushroom cloud, Einstein’s hair had come to symbolize humanity’s inability to control the destructive forces of nature. “See where it’s all broken?” said Stephen. “As men age, there’s less circulation in the tops of their heads. Their hair just grows to a certain length and starts breaking off.” And if Einstein were to walk into Technicuts today? “I’d leave conditioner on for a while,” said Sharon. Stephen would go farther. “I’d apply a glaze,” he said, “something to reduce the frizziness and get those fly-aways under control.” And then? “Shape it,” said Sharon. “Layer it,” said Stephen, “keep it long. “Yeah, keep it long,” Sharon concurred. Then she added what Einstein must have known about himself all along: “He doesn’t strike me as a short-hair person.” db |