Statue
The memorial situated in an elm and holly grove in the southwest corner of the National Academy of Sciences grounds, was unveiled at the Academy's annual meeting, April 22, 1979, in honor of the centennial of the great scientist's birth. Einstein is depicted seated on a three-step bench of white granite. The bronze figure, weighing approximately 4 tons, is 12 feet in height. Three caissons, totaling 135 tons, sunk in bedrock to a depth of 23 to 25 feet, support the monument.
In its left hand, the figure holds a paper with mathematical equations summarizing three of Einstein's most important scientific contributions: the photoelectric effect, the theory of general relativity, and the equivalence of energy and matter. Three quotations from Einstein are engraved on the bench where the figure is seated:
As long as I have any choice in the matter, I shall live only in a country where civil liberty, tolerance, and equality of all citizens before the law prevail.
Joy and amazement at the beauty and grandeur of this world of which man can just form a faint notion ...
The right to search for truth implies also a duty; one must not conceal any part of what one has recognized to be true.
The sculptor, Robert Berks, known for his portrait busts (John F. Kennedy at Washington's Kennedy Center), based the work on a bust of Einstein he sculpted from life in 1953 at Einstein's Princeton home. Landscape architect James A. Van Sweden designed the monument landscaping. Einstein was elected a foreign associate of the Academy in 1922 and became a member in 1942, two years after he became a naturalized citizen.
Read more about this topic: Albert Einstein Memorial
Famous quotes containing the word statue:
“Only he who can view his own past as an abortion sprung from compulsion and need can use it to full advantage in the present. For what one has lived is at best comparable to a beautiful statue which has had all its limbs knocked off in transit, and now yields nothing but the precious block out of which the image of one’s future must be hewn.”
—Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)
“Where the statue stood
Of Newton with his prism and silent face,
The marble index of a mind for ever
Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone.”
—William Wordsworth (1770–1850)
“The statue is then beautiful when it begins to be incomprehensible, when it is passing out of criticism, and can no longer be defined by compass and measuring-wand, but demands an active imagination to go with it, and to say what it is in the act of doing.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)