EINSTEIN’S AFGHAN CONNECTION?

CUNY Graduate Center’s director of special projects, Adrienne Klein, and the vice president for research and sponsored programs, Brian Schwarz, ran a casting call in Back Stage for “Einstein Look-A-likes” to serve as greeters at the center’s Einstein birthday celebration on Monday.

Yesterday, a single Einstein look-alike, Latif Rashidzada, showed up. Mr. Rashidzada, who has a modest demeanor and a wild, white mane of hair, was born in Kabul and now lives in Hackensack, N.J. The former restaurateur’s son’s girlfriend told him about the ad in Back Stage. WNYC and a German radio station interviewed him, and a reporter from a German television channel filmed him.

With chalk in hand, Mr. Rashidzada looked the part while standing before E=mc² scrawled across a blackboard. The novice actor made a less successful impression when he began to discuss physics in front of the cameras. Mr. Schwartz, who used to teach physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, stepped in to help. Ms. Klein said she wished she had brought Mr. Rashidzada a chocolate Nobel medal that she had.

On Monday at 4 p.m. at the CUNY Graduate Center, two of Einstein’s associates – both distinguished nonagenarians – will reminisce about their former colleague. In a program cosponsored by the New York Academy of Sciences, a former president of Rockefeller University, Frederick Seitz, and William Golden, who served as a special assistant to President Truman, will offer recollections.

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NO JOKE

Plans are afoot to honor theoretical physicist and Far Rockaway native Richard Feynman, who died of cancer in 1988.The U.S. Postal Service is slated to roll out a stamp in his honor, and the bongo-playing, safe-cracking, Nobel Prize-winning genius and joker may soon be memorialized in Far Rockaway as well.

One of his key contributions to science was Feynman Diagrams, which show how subatomic particles behave according to the theories of quantum mechanics. “They are a roadmap to calculation so that physicists wouldn’t get lost,” said Ralph Leighton, who co-authored Feynman’s best-selling autobiography, “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! Adventures of a Curious Character.” The diagrams became standard notation for theoretical physics and are featured on the forthcoming stamp.

The stamp is slated to be launched at Yale University during the first week of May as part of a series of four American scientists. But Mr. Leighton hopes for a “second day issue” in Far Rockaway on Feynman’s birthday, May 11. At the Far Rockaway stamp ceremony, Mr. Leighton said he expected there to be plenty of drumming. Feynman picked up drumming while working on the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos.

The title “Surely You’re Joking” came out of an incident between Feynman and the wife of a dean at Princeton University. The dean’s wife offered Feynman cream or lemon in his tea. The scientist said he would take both. Feynman helped build the atomic bomb and was a pioneering figure in quantum electrodynamics. But it was his iconoclastic personality that endeared him to the general public.

Scientists are known to swap Feynman stories at conferences, and his unorthodox antics are the subject of lore more than 15 years after his death. Whether solving scientific problems while sitting at a topless club, studying ants while in the bathtub, or cracking Los Alamos office safes (and leaving messages in them), Feynman was a colorful figure. He had a knack for explaining science to laymen: He once described the neutrino particle as almost “but not quite totally useless – take your son-in-law as a model.” His direct manner attracted headlines during the investigation of the Challenger space shuttle disaster. In a memorable inexpensive demonstration, he dropped a piece of an O-ring in a cup of ice water and it became brittle, proving its vulnerability.

His memory lives on in New York. Brian Schwartz described more Feynman events in the works: a radio host at WFMU, Dorian Devins, will moderate a panel about Feynman on May 2 at the CUNY Graduate Center. He said the line-up would feature an emeritus faculty member from the Institute for Advanced Study, Freeman Dyson, who was a colleague of Feynman; a physicist who works at Lucent Technologies, Phil Platzman, who was a graduate student of Feynman’s, and a senior editor at Discover magazine, Corey Powell. Following it is a reading of Arthur Giron’s play “Moving Bodies,” a dramatization of Feynman’s biography.

Mr. Schwartz has written to the chair of Queens Community Board No. 14 requesting that a street in Feynman’s old neighborhood be named after him; his house at 792 Cornaga Avenue still stands. “He was a very independent thinker – extremely creative,” Mr. Schwartz told the Knickerbocker, adding that Feynman was also “a bit of a character.”

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FUTURE OF BUSINESS

The Ukrainian Institute overlooking Central Park was the site of a party Monday for the book “The Future for Investors” (Crown Business), by a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, Jeremy Siegel.

Regarding finishing his book, Mr. Siegel said his family would continually ask him “Are you done yet?” not unlike that familiar car trip question: “Are we there yet?”

Mr. Siegel said some attendees might consider selling their signed copies of his book on eBay. But, he joked, he signs so many that “the ones that aren’t signed are worth more than those that are.”

On a more serious note, he said the finest compliment came from one of his sons who told him, “You know, dad, this is pretty good.”

Among those in the audience were three from Wharton’s class of 2003: Bonnie Schein, Ryan Hinkle, and Jeremy Schwartz, who helped research the book.

Index Development Partners, Maria Bartiromo, James Robinson III, James Robinson IV, Jonathan Steinberg, Saul Steinberg, and Michael Steinhardt hosted the event.