My very smart pal Peter Dizikes has a fine piece in The Boston Globe’s Ideas section about the way that popular representations of Albert Einstein—“the detached, elderly professor with unruly white hair, a lined face, sloping shoulders, and a contemplative gaze, occasionally given to bemusement”—have obscured the world-historical importance of the scientific work he did when he was younger:

Einstein’s has become the all-purpose face of genius. ”Like a logo,” says Peter L. Galison, a historian of science at Harvard and author of ”Einstein’s Clocks, Poincare’s Maps” (2003). Used this way, adds Galison, ”Einstein is voided of any meaning at all. He’s just smart or wise.” A recent ESPN.com article wondering if New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick could be considered a genius featured photos of two people: Belichick and Einstein.

This iconography, though it may seem harmless enough, obscures the Einstein who actually revolutionized physics. In this, the 100th anniversary of the year Einstein announced his Special Theory of Relativity, the disparity between the aging celebrity scientist and the formidable young figure upending our conception of the universe seems especially jarring. In 1905, Einstein was an intense, even feisty young man of 26 with many worldly concerns, including a wife and a job. He had dark hair and a solid build. ”A massive body, very heavily muscled,” the English writer and physicist C.P. Snow noted years later.