Ernesto Altshuler, a physics professor at the University of Havana in Cuba, got the idea for a statue of Albert Einstein while he was planning celebrations for the International Year of Physics in 2005. It was the centenary of Einstein’s annus mirabilis, when he published four groundbreaking papers. “I thought that a statue would be interesting both intrinsically and to attract students,” Altshuler says.
It took nearly two decades, but a life-size statue of Einstein now graces the entrance to the university’s physics department. It was inaugurated on 27 March.
The statue took so long to realize, Altshuler says, mostly because he wasn’t able to raise money for it. In late 2005 Altshuler took to the Web to vent his frustrations with a post he titled “A dream that didn’t come true.”
A dozen years later, in 2017, that vent caught the eye of Wolfgang Bietenholz, a physicist at the...
