"Since that deluge of newspaper
articles I have been so flooded with questions, invitations, suggestions, that I
keep dreaming I am roasting in Hell, and the mailman is the devil eternally yelling
at me, showering me with more bundles of letters at my head because I have not
answered the old ones."
Announcement of the eclipse results caused a sensation, and not only among
scientists. It brought home to the public a transformation of physics, by Einstein
and others, that was overturning established views of time, space, matter, and
energy. Einstein became the world's symbol of the new physics. Some journalists
took a perverse delight in exaggerating the incomprehensibility of his theory,
claiming that only a genius could understand it. More serious thinkers --
philosophers, artists, ordinary educated and curious people -- took the trouble to
study the new concepts. These people too chose Einstein as a symbol for thought at
its highest.
"I have become rather like King Midas, except that everything turns
not into gold but into a circus."