Benyamin Cohen is not just the news direc­tor of the For­ward; he also serves as the man­ag­er of Albert Einstein’s offi­cial social media accounts. His newest book, The Ein­stein Effect, exam­ines Einstein’s unique posi­tion as the most pop­u­lar sci­en­tist in mod­ern his­to­ry. ​“Near­ly sev­en decades after Einstein’s death,” writes Cohen, ​“he is still a celebri­ty. Nowhere is this more evi­dent than on social media, where he has blue-checked ver­i­fied accounts, with near­ly twen­ty mil­lion fol­low­ers on Face­book (more than Tom Han­ks!), anoth­er mil­lion on Insta­gram, and more than half a mil­lion on Twitter.”

The first chap­ter of The Ein­stein Effect tells the sto­ry of Einstein’s brain, which was sep­a­rat­ed from his body hours after his death for the pur­pose of study­ing it. No defin­i­tive con­clu­sion has been reached about whether Einstein’s brain was the rea­son for his genius, but Cohen’s encounter with it is an amaz­ing, if not bizarre, sto­ry. It ends with Cohen view­ing a por­tion of the brain, which had been divid­ed into over 240 pieces years before, in the park­ing lot of Prince­ton Air­port in the back of an Acu­ra MDX.

The book’s sub­se­quent chap­ters explore Einstein’s influ­ence on every­thing from the devel­op­ment of GPS, to the search for extrater­res­tri­al life, to his depic­tion in pop­u­lar cul­ture, to his lead­er­ship in orga­ni­za­tions that have saved the lives of refugees around the world. Anoth­er sto­ry begins in a bar in Holon, Israel, where three ine­bri­at­ed sci­en­tists — a space engi­neer, a cyber­se­cu­ri­ty expert, and a drone mak­er — join forces to estab­lish SpaceIL, which will even­tu­al­ly build Beresheet, the first space­ship aimed for the moon to be devel­oped entire­ly with pri­vate fund­ing. While SpaceIL’s tech­nol­o­gy relied heav­i­ly on Einstein’s dis­cov­er­ies, par­tic­u­lar­ly Einstein’s research on the pho­to­elec­tric effect, SpaceIL also attrib­ut­es the can-do atti­tude of its scrap­py team of under­fund­ed Israeli sci­en­tists to Einstein’s ​“under­dog ethos.” Despite his pop­u­lar­i­ty today, the sci­en­tif­ic com­mu­ni­ty scoffed at Einstein’s ear­ly work because ​“he was upend­ing the entire­ty of physics and, with it, our under­stand­ing of the uni­verse.” Accord­ing to Yonatan Wein­traub, the engi­neer of the group, it was Einstein’s atti­tude in the face of oppo­si­tion, as much as his sci­ence, that inspired the birth of Beresheet.

Cohen describes The Ein­stein Effect as a ​“quixot­ic quest to dis­cov­er Einstein’s invis­i­ble hand impact­ing the mod­ern world.” This self-dep­re­cat­ing descrip­tion doesn’t come close to cap­tur­ing the book’s com­pelling nar­ra­tive. Cohen clos­es his homage to Ein­stein by writ­ing, ​“Now, per­haps more than ever, we hunger for a fig­ure that we can all coa­lesce around. Politi­cians are divi­sive and celebri­ties come and go, but Ein­stein and his trans­for­ma­tive ideas have with­stood the test of time. He has impact­ed mul­ti­tudes.” Cohen’s book is enter­tain­ing, but it also offers us an oppor­tu­ni­ty to be fur­ther inspired by the world’s most famous celebri­ty – scientist.