Robert Cleva shows off his Crasche Middie women’s lacrosse helmet.

Many years ago, Robert Cleva, who runs a commercial real estate business in Woodbury, fell off his bike, landed on the grass and hit his head. An avid exercise enthusiast, he got back on his bike the next day and wore a baseball batting helmet. Dissatisfied with other bike helmets and unhappy with his fallback version, he came up with his own design, eventually patenting a product for bikers, skiers and skateboarders—even police officers.

“People who don’t want to look like they’re wearing a helmet but want to have protection are our clients,” says Cleva, whose online head gear company is called Crasche New York. Last year they began marketing the Crasche Hat, which looks like a woolen ski cap (it’s actually 100 percent Acrylic) but has hidden “impact-resistant protective inserts” made out of polycarbonate plastic and padded with neoprene rubber and air chambers to cushion the shock.

Cleva noticed that parents were buying the Crasche Hat for their daughters playing lacrosse—especially if the girls had suffered concussions—and that surprised him. He had it tested to determine its effectiveness against the impacts of lacrosse sticks and balls to the player’s head.

“It turned out to be a very good product for stick to head but it was marginal for ball to head,” Cleva says.

In February 2012 he’d submitted the hat model to US Lacrosse (USL), the sport’s national governing body, based in Baltimore, where the first women’s lacrosse team played in the United States in 1926. The league itself has been debating how to address the concussion issue—a debate that Cleva inadvertently got caught up in. At first, he got an encouraging reply from Melissa Coyne, the women’s game director at USL.

“Your product complies with current USL rules for women’s lacrosse,” Coyne emailed Cleva in March 2012. “Hope that helps!”

But with the test results in hand, Cleva decided to redesign his product so it could withstand a ball speeding to the head at 78 mph and reduce the impact below the concussive level.

“We re-engineered it, and informed US Lacrosse that we’d made some changes,” Cleva says. “We opened it up—took the top off—because the girls didn’t want the skull cap, they wanted their hair [coming] out the top.”

He named the new model the Crasche Middie, after a lacrosse position. It resembled a head band, available in red, white, black, navy blue or light blue.

“It’s designed to rest on the head,” Cleva explains. “It’s attached to the goggles. When you pull the goggles down, it goes back with it.”

He’s most proud of the material used in the new headgear’s inserts. “You could hit the thing with a sledge hammer and you can’t crack it,” he says.

At this year’s January national lacrosse convention in Philadelphia, Cleva set up a booth featuring the Crashe Middies underneath a big banner proclaiming, “The future of headgear in girls lacrosse.” The future was short-lived, however. USL officials shut him down and escorted him out of the building. Cleva thought USL’s previous approval of the Crasche Hat extended to the Crasche Middie. He was mistaken, they informed him. He would have to submit his new design for approval.

“It happened to be seen by one of our rules committee members who brought up the fact that this product was different from the one that we had approved and this had not been approved,” Coyne tells the Press. “It’s significantly different!” She added that the Crasche Middie brochure “made some pretty incredible claims of its protective value, and that concerned some members of our organization, specifically our sports, science and safety committee…”

After Cleva submitted his new headgear for their examination, the USL’s rules subcommittee determined that the product was “deemed illegal for play.”  In their email to him, they said it violated “portions of Rule 2” regarding “Soft Head Gear…defined as any head covering without hard or unyielding parts that have the potential to injure another player. The product, Crasche Middie, contains hard inserts that are not unyielding which could possibly pose a danger to other players. Additionally, those inserts which [sic] are not adequately padded or appropriately secured and can be easily dislodged. They could potentially injure the player wearing the product or another player.”

Cleva was infuriated by USL’s response and wrote Coyne the following: “To claim that the inserts can come loose is patently false. To claim that they become a danger to other players is ridiculous.”

He sent them an impact test from ICS Laboratories in Ohio, which he’d paid for, claiming it showed that not only did his headgear pose no threat to another player it actually reduced the force of two players knocking heads if one wore the Crasche Middie and the other girl didn’t. USL’s Coyne was not persuaded.

“Parents are looking for protective headgear. We understand that,” says Coyne. “But we as a governing body also have a responsibility to make sure that consumers are protected.”

Coyne told Cleva that US Lacrosse is working closely with ASTM International, a nonprofit organization based in Pennsylvania formerly known as the American Society for Testing and Materials, to create a women’s lacrosse headgear standard. She suggested his company become a member. Cleva says joining would cost only $75, but he’s concerned that the terms of the membership could impinge on his patent rights. He is having his lawyer look into that issue before he signs up. Without a doubt, he insists, “My product will be the standard because it’s so effective.”

Of more immediate concern, he says, is that one of ASTM’s current members told him that setting standards could take two years at least. Any delay is hard for Cleva to take.

“How many girls who are denied the use of the Crasche Middie will subsequently suffer a preventable head injury?” Cleva wrote Coyne back in February after she suggested he wait until USL’s committee meeting in June.

The answer is that nobody knows.

A researcher at George Mason University, Shane Caswell, partnered with two members of USL’s sports science and safety committee to examine head injury incidents reported during 2008 and 2009 involving high school girls’ lacrosse players between the ages of 14 and 18 years old. Their study came out in February 2012. Gathering data from 529 varsity and junior varsity games, they found 21 concussions. Most of these injuries resulted from stick-to-head contact in front of the goal.

Coyne says that USL is constantly monitoring national research on the occurrence of concussions in the sport. “I don’t necessarily see that we’ve had this huge jump in the actual injury,” she says. “I think the actual diagnosis has been what’s changed.”

The girls’ game is intended to be safer than the boys’ game, says Stephanie Degennaro, who manages the Lacrosse Unlimited store in Miller Place. She played varsity lacrosse at Longwood High School in Brookhaven and at Stony Brook University. When she’s not selling merchandise for “the fastest sport on two feet,” she’s coaching and refereeing girls’ games.

“Basically women’s lacrosse is supposed to be a non-contact sport,” she says. “Everything is supposed to be finesse and controlled… Men’s lacrosse is a contact sport like football.”

Degennaro’s store does not carry headgear for girls, but she has noticed players wearing “these headband things” and “those soft foam ‘ugly’ helmets” on the field.

“Approving headgear is going to make the girls’ game more violent,” she says. “To be completely honest, I wouldn’t want to see the game go that way. Some of the girls out there wearing these helmets act as if they’re invincible. I would only want to give [headgear] to girls who’ve had prior concussions.”

One of those girls playing lacrosse with a concussion is Cindy Dreher’s 10-year-old daughter, Darby, who picked up the sport after watching her two older brothers play. The Babylon Village mother bought her a Crasche Middie because she had gotten a concussion from a serious horse-back riding accident last year.

“My daughter has dark hair so you don’t even notice she’s wearing it out there,” Dreher tells the Press. “It looks like a band for sweat. It doesn’t look like a helmet at all.”

Dreher had looked for a long time before she found Cleva’s product online.

“I had to do some research because what’s available for girls right now is this ridiculously stupid, soft helmet that doesn’t protect at all,” Dreher says. “They say it’s a ‘non-aggressive game’ but I don’t care because it’s got a stick and a ball, and those girls are very capable of hitting each other pretty hard with it…”

Lacrosse Unlimited’s Hauppauge store manager, Jason Sweet, a high school and college lax (lacrosse) player who still plays, thinks that giving girls’ more protection will change their game. “They might as well get gloves, too, and go out there and beat each other up like we do!” laughs Sweet, who’s had three concussions himself, but none since he started wearing a $234 helmet. By comparison, the Crasche Middie retails for under $30.

“I would say that most parents want headgear [for girls],” Sweet says, “Most players don’t.”

Cleva thinks one obstacle facing his product’s approval is growing tension within girls’ lacrosse about the future of the game.

“You have one camp that says, ‘Let’s put helmets on and protect the girls, and become like a boys’ sport. If it’s rough and tumble, who cares?’” Cleva explains. “The other side is saying: ‘That’s the worst thing. We don’t want the game to change. Leave it alone.’ US Lacrosse is in the ‘leave-it-alone’ camp. This is a big controversy, and I’ve kind of fallen into the middle of it.”

As of now only goalies in girls lacrosse are permitted to wear hard helmets. Goggles were mandated for all female players in 2004—New York State reportedly led this initiative—but now USL is considering whether the eyewear standards should be revised. “We’re taking a good look at that,” Coyne says.

Last week, Cleva got his hopes up when a USL official asked him to send his headgear to the rules committee at the National Collegiate Athletic Association. Then he learned that the USL’s own subcommittee, scheduled to convene this month, had tabled discussion of his headgear until June “when they can get the entire rules committee together,” Cleva says.

“Mr. Cleva has been told on several occasions that if he adjusts his product to fit the two elements that we wanted fixed – if he makes those adjustments—we are happy to look at his product again,” says Coyne. “But he has to address them just like anyone else. He’s not the first person to be rejected.”

Cleva has demonstrated the headgear’s ability to hang onto its inserts to Rep. Tim Bishop (D-Southampton) and to an aide in the office of Rep. Peter King (R-Seaford). He doesn’t believe USL is giving his product a fair shake.

“They’re saying it can come out and it can’t come out!” Cleva exclaims. Given the opportunity, this reporter shook the Middie as hard as possible for almost a minute and finally an insert dislodged when the head gear was hurled against the floor.

“When a 10-year-old comes to your office and her mother is terrified that the girl’s going to get hurt, it’s the human element that’s overpowering,” Cleva says. “We think we offer a very reasonable product that is going to offer impact protection and give some peace of mind to people and these people won’t let your daughter buy it.”

The newly appointed director of the Brookhaven National Laboratory—one of the nation’s most advanced research facilities—does normal things like any Long Island father of two teenage sons. He watches a lot of soccer and grills on the weekends. He also helps his wife in the kitchen.

But Doon Gibbs’ career is routinely mind-boggling. He’s studied “scattered X-rays,” “condensed matter,” nano-materials and magnetism; he’s stood elbow to elbow with scientists looking into the origin of the universe and others using isotopes to treat cancer or figuring out how to make a better battery.

After getting his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1982, Gibbs joined BNL a year later as an assistant physicist. In 2007 he became deputy laboratory director for science and technology, and filled in as the interim director last December until he got the top job on March 29th. Now he oversees 3,000 employees, more than 4,000 facility users, and handles an annual budget of more than $700 million, which is subject to the very unscientific whims of Congress.

Gibbs, 59, is fluent in the inner workings of BNL’s National Synchrotron Light Source II, which streams X-rays to probe matter, and he’s familiar with another one of the lab’s cutting-edge technologies, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC, pronounced “Rick”), which gives scientists “a glimpse of the universe within a few millionths of a second after it was born—and that’s really cool.”

Basically, the multi-million-dollar device accelerates ions in opposite directions within some football field-size underground rings until the ions collide at temperatures that are 250,000 times hotter than the center of the sun. But the collision doesn’t last “long enough to heat your coffee up,” Gibbs says. “The protons melt for a very brief instant,” he explains, “and that lets us look at the fundamental particles inside—they’re called quarks and gluons—and what we find is that at those high temperatures and those densities they form a perfect fluid. It flows without viscosity, without resistance—and it’s a total surprise!”

Physicists call these interactions of quarks and gluons “strongly correlated,” Gibbs says, “and they have surprising analogies in high-temperature superconductors and in ultra-cold atoms and, amazingly enough, in black holes. So there may well be some underlying principles that connect those surprisingly different phenomena.”

Gibbs grew up in Utah, where his dad was a physicist, but he didn’t intend to follow in his footsteps. In college he studied English and the humanities at first. “I tried lots of other things, and I discovered that the kinds of things I was really interested in ultimately had to do with science, with asking really specific kinds of questions and then trying to answer them definitively.”

But some pursuits are better left unsaid, he admits.

“‘Why is there a universe?’ isn’t the kind of question that us science guys normally take on,” he chuckles.

Asked how he got his name, he says his parents had called him Grundoon, a baby groundhog character in Walt Kelly’s comic strip “Pogo,” known for having trouble keeping his diaper on. “When I was two or three, I said, ‘Me Doon, not Grundoon.’” His resolve was irrefutable, so the name stuck.

One problem with becoming BNL’s director is that he doesn’t regularly get to do research anymore. It makes him wistful but he looks at the big picture.

“When you do have some kind of a discovery that you’re a part of, whether it’s large or small, it’s really exciting and personal,” he says. “I think I’m pretty happy exactly where I am.”

Inside the workings of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider

Physicists exploring the subatomic realm are well aware of the uncertainty principle at work on the particles there but now a federal report has come out that casts the future of America’s most advanced physics experiments in doubt at the Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC).

The issue, as it is with many things involving the federal government these days, involves funding. But more importantly what’s at stake is the United States’ ability to remain at the forefront of cutting-edge science.

Last week a report was released by a subpanel of the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation’s Nuclear Science Advisory Committee that recommended closing the heavy ion collider if federal funding remains flat or just keeps up with inflation in the coming years. The report, named after the subpanel’s chairman Robert Tribble, a nuclear physicist based at the Cyclotron Institute at Texas A&M University, favored completing a facility now under construction at Michigan State University and maintaining another facility at the Jefferson Lab in Virginia, which is being upgraded.

A modest increase more than inflation, the report suggested, might keep all facilities at least on track. Of America’s the three large atomic research labs, only BNL’s RHIC is currently operating, and it is set to run a series of high-level experiments starting Feb. 11 that will last until the summer.

In Monday’s response to the report’s worst-case scenario, the Empire State’s Congressional representatives have begun to weigh in. Both New York’s Democratic Senators, Charles Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, have called on the Office of Management and Budget and the Department of Energy to increase funding of its nuclear physics program by an additional $50 million for the next fiscal year.

“Even though this report is non-binding, it should serve as a call to arms for those who care about scientific research, Long Island’s economy, and our nation’s position at the forefront of innovation,” said Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY).  “The solution to the problem is simply to make sure that the budget for nuclear research in this country is given a modest boost, so that hundreds of jobs on Long Island are preserved and America remains at the cutting edge of nuclear research.  Cutting our nuclear research now, and ceding our advantage to our competitors, is penny wise and pound foolish.”

“Closing a facility that plays an important role in the future of U.S. competitiveness and supports hundreds of jobs is the wrong approach,” said Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY). “If we are going to out-innovate and out-compete other countries in the fields of science and technology, we must continue to invest in cutting edge facilities like the country’s only ion collider at Brookhaven National Lab.”

In a jointly authored letter to the outgoing Secretary of Energy Steven Chu and acting director of the Office of Management and Budget Jeffrey Zients, the senators wrote: “Now is not the time to scale back federal funding for such critical basic research and important scientific facilities and cede our position of leadership in these fields of study.  Our economic competitors in China, India and other countries have seen our success in these areas and now copy our approach to innovation and are increasing their rate of investment at a time when we seem to be considering the opposite.

“Strengthening U.S. investment in nuclear physics is the right thing to do to develop technologies to improve national security, identify and cure disease and meet our energy challenges, as well as to expand our knowledge about the makeup of the universe through scientific discovery.  Americans stand to benefit today and in the future from U.S. investment in nuclear physics through better medical imaging and diagnostic tools, new cancer therapies, advanced tools to deter nuclear proliferation and innovative energy storage systems.”

Rep. Tim Bishop (D-Southampton) has been working closely with the offices of both senators to coordinate a response, and together they reversed deep cuts Republicans in Congress had proposed in spending bills in the past. They hope to do the same this time around, too.

“I have fought successfully in the past to protect Brookhaven National Lab from damaging budget cuts that would hurt Long Island’s economy and threaten America’s international leadership in research and development,” said Rep. Tim Bishop. “I am coordinating closely with Lab officials and Senators Schumer and Gillibrand to make the case that the cutting-edge research in energy, medicine and other fields performed at the RHIC is a national priority that deserves sustained funding.”

The RHIC is world-renown for its ability to recreate the conditions presumed to match the universe in the first moments of existence so scientists can study in detail the type of matter at the beginning and understand the force that holds together “the fundamental particles that make up 99 percent” of the visible world—from stars to planets to people.

“We believe that RHIC science, past and future, is compelling and essential both for the DOE mission as well as for U.S. leadership in nuclear physics — and the Tribble report strongly reflects that view,” says Doon Gibbs, BNL’s interim laboratory director. “We will continue to advocate for science, for RHIC, and for Brookhaven Lab in all that we do.”

In a statement on the lab’s website, Gibbs said that he’s been in touch with the other two labs’ directors and “we have agreed to work together to realize the modest growth path.”

WHAT A PAIR: David Rothman was in his work clothes and Albert Einstein was dressed for the beach when they posed on this rock at Horseshoe Cove in Nassau Point in the summer of 1939.
(Photo by Reginald Donahue/Courtesy the Rothmans)

Scientists at the Brookhaven National Laboratory call this coming Feb. 11 the “cool-down” day. That’s when they start chilling the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider to the temperature of liquid helium (more than 450 degrees below zero) so they can begin colliding polarized protons in a series of physics experiments set to run through the spring that would have thrilled Albert Einstein, had he lived long enough to see them.

The world-renown scientist will be there in spirit, no doubt, because “all nuclear and particle physicists owe a debt to Einstein,” says Robert Crease, a Stony Brook professor and the lab’s official historian who wrote “Making Physics: The first 25 years of the history of BNL” and is now working on the sequel.

The circular subterranean electro-magnetic corridor collider, known as RHIC (pronounced “Rick”) for short, “relies very essentially on Einstein’s theory of relativity,” says Berndt Mueller, BNL’s associate director for nuclear and particle physics, because it explores a non-linear strong force similar to gravity.  “If Einstein were alive today, I think he would be very fascinated by the results.”

For Einstein, who died in 1955, Long Island only meant a place where he could enjoy himself.

In 1937 the Long-Islander mentioned that Einstein had “passed the summer” at Maud Klots’ home on West Shore Road, which runs along Huntington Harbor, and sailed to Halesite to pick up his mail.  If he made much of a splash on his vacation, it didn’t last long.

The same can’t be said for the memorable months he spent out east in 1939 when he rented a cottage on Nassau Point in Cutchogue so he could put his sailboat in Horseshoe Cove. Before that summer was over Einstein would sign a letter to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt warning him that the United States couldn’t afford to wait while Nazi Germany was possibly making a nuclear weapon.

But that dire notion was far from his mind when he took his sister Maja, his step-daughter Margot, his son Hans, and his secretary Helen Dukas to the North Fork. They even brought a little Airedale terrier that scratched frantically at a door in the living room whenever Einstein would try to close it, prompting him to ask a visitor once: “Do you suppose he can see the door is contracting in the direction of its motion, and he does not know what to make of it and it makes him angry?”

The answer eluded him but the question showed how he thought, even on holiday. His summer place is still there on West Cove Road (Einstein had misspelled it “Grove” in a letter). The house has changed, and the neighborhood has grown, but he might recognize the lingering sentiment. A local woman named Louise Thompson, whose parents lived across the street from him, recalled in a story that Newsday ran on the centennial of his birth in 1979, that he had “wanted to have access to the beach through our property [and] my mother wasn’t too interested in that.” After all, she said her mother told him, “Professor Einstein, you are here for privacy and so are we.”

Apparently the younger generation on Nassau Point didn’t appreciate the two main activities Einstein did to occupy his time there: sailing and violin playing. Einstein, who never learned to swim, had no pretentions about his nautical prowess. He had named his 17-foot glorified rowboat the Tinef, which is supposedly Yiddish for junk.

“We kids who were growing up here know how to sail. He didn’t,” Thompson said. “He’d tip over, and once I can remember some of the local boys going out to rescue him.”

That wasn’t an uncommon occurrence, apparently, with Einstein at the helm. After a sailing mishap in the Long Island Sound when his family had rented a cottage at Old Lyme, Conn., in 1935, the New York Times ran the headline, “Relative Tide and Sand Bars Trap Einstein.”

Thompson and her Peconic peers weren’t much impressed with Einstein’s musical prowess, either, perhaps because he’d play his instrument “all the time” on his porch during those summer evenings and “we kids didn’t think much of it. We thought he was terrible.”

Fortunately, Einstein had a big fan in Southold. David Rothman, who had opened Rothman’s Department Store in 1919, hadn’t graduated high school but he had maintained an avid interest in science. He recognized Einstein’s stepdaughter Margot when she entered his store looking for a chisel sharpener (she was a sculptor). Rothman presented it to her as a gift and asked her to convey his “respects to her father,” as he recalled.

The next day, Einstein came into the store himself looking for “sundials.” Or so Rothman thought and he dutifully showed him the one he had in the backyard. Einstein pointed to his feet. He really needed sandals, so Rothman sold him the largest pair he had left: women’s size 11. Einstein, who’d described himself in a letter to a friend as “a kind of ancient figure known primarily for his non-use of socks and wheeled out on special occasions as a curiosity,” gladly wore them all summer, along with a pair of shorts tied around his waist with a piece of rope, and a white sports shirt.

When the 60-year-old scientist had first entered his store, Rothman, then 43, was playing Mozart’s “Symphony No. 40” on his phonograph and they started talking about music. Rothman had begun playing the violin when he was 36; Einstein had started when he was six, but he insisted they play together. The next evening Rothman came out to Nassau Point with his instrument and some sheet music, but he was out of his league almost immediately and so they spent the rest of the night chatting. They clicked, and later Rothman arranged many musical evenings at his Southold home where Einstein and a few friends would play. Sometimes almost a hundred people listened outside, hoping for a glimpse of the famous scientist.

Rothman’s recollections of his experiences with his celebrated companion have been published by his daughter Joan Rothman Brill and his grandsons Ron Rothman, a talented guitarist who runs the Southold store today, and Chuck Rothman, a science fiction writer living in Schenectady.

Ron Rothman, who runs Rothman’s Department Store in Southold, holds the book he published that recounts his grandfather’s friendship with Albert Einstein in 1939. (Photo by Spencer Rumsey/Long Island Press)

“The way I see it,” says Ron Rothman, “that summer my grandfather palled around with Albert Einstein to the point where he would come in and he would sleep on the couch. He would spend time playing music, and they would go around doing things.” In the photos of his “gramps” and the scientist, Einstein is in vacation mode casual, while Rothman is wearing a business suit because “that’s the way people dressed for work then,” his grandson says with a smile.

One day Rothman waited hours for Einstein, who had planned to sail around Nassau Point to Southold. It was almost dark when the phone rang at his store, as he reminisced to Newsday. On the line was a New York City cop on vacation, who shouted, “Rothman, there’s some wild-looking guy that needs a haircut—some helluva looking looney—down here on the beach wanting to know where you live!”

Another time Einstein had just come back from sailing and Rothman was talking to him on his porch when two harried young Hungarian physicists living in exile, Leo Szilard and Eugene Wigner, drove up. They’d come from Manhattan to see him and couldn’t find the cottage until a kid in town had told them which one it was. Szilard, who had studied with Einstein in Berlin and even shared a patent with him for a “new, noiseless refrigerator,” was on an urgent mission because he’d had the disturbing revelation that uranium could be used to create a nuclear chain reaction.

“I never thought of that!” Einstein exclaimed in German. The two Hungarians first thought they’d get Einstein to write the queen of Belgium, Einstein’s friend, and warn her that if the Germans conquered her country, they’d gain control over the Belgian Congo, which then had the world’s largest supply of uranium. He agreed. Szilard, “who was nothing if not obsessive,” according to biographer Jeremy Bernstein, wanted to reach President Roosevelt, and so through his connections at Columbia University, he contacted one of FDR’s economics advisers, Alexander Sachs, who agreed to carry a letter to the president if it had Einstein’s signature. By that point, Wigner had gone to California so Szilard got another Hungarian physicist with a driver’s license, Edward Teller, to go back out to Nassau Point. After completing two versions, a long one and a short one, Einstein signed them both on Aug. 9, warning the president about “extremely powerful bombs of a new type.”

By 1939, Einstein had come to regard the use of force as the only way to stop fascism—but he never worked on the Manhattan Project although his letter was its spark.

Sachs gave Einstein’s letter to Roosevelt on Oct. 11, a month after Hitler had invaded Poland. The next morning Roosevelt created the Advisory Committee on Uranium, naming Szilard, Wigner and Teller to it, but not Einstein, perhaps because FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, no friend of German Jews trying to emigrate, had viewed Einstein as a security risk because he’d previously proclaimed in Europe that “I am a militant pacifist” and he kept a large file on him once he came to America.

A man of peace, Einstein would have appreciated that, since the former Camp Upton’s reincarnation as a national laboratory in 1947, the BNL never did weapons research. For decades scientists there have been committed to exploring the inner workings of the atom to advance human understanding—although their research is always at the mercy of Congressional largesse and that’s never predictable.

FINE FIDDLER: Albert Einstein, playing his violin in David Rothman’s living room, told the Southold department store owner he’d had the best summer of his life thanks to him. (Photo by David Rothman)

According to his many biographers, Einstein—“the last of the great classical physicists”—may have not liked being in a classroom (in Germany his teachers called him a “dreamy” child) but he loved sharing the profound joy he found in physics, and that’s why he was determined to explain one of his theories to Rothman before he returned to the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton. After all, when Einstein published his relativity paper in 1905, he didn’t even have a Ph.D. and was working in a patent office.

Einstein’s goal with Rothman, as Rothman told his daughter, was to demonstrate to his friend Dr. Gustav Bucky, another esteemed physicist who’d come out to Nassau Point to visit him that summer, “that a layman, in fact a mere merchant, could comprehend these problems.” Rothman’s only stipulation was that the great scientist should not use math since he’d never gone past eighth grade. Einstein assured his friend it could be done. “You know, I use no instruments,” Einstein told him. “My tools are simply a pad and a pencil. This is all I have ever needed.”

What he’d make of BNL’s multi-million-dollar high tech tool for experimental physics can only be left for speculation. According to researchers familiar with his archives, Einstein never visited the lab.

What is known is that on a Sunday afternoon in 1939 the most famous scientist of the 20^th century and the Southold department store owner spent three hours together wrestling with the problem: why a spinning rod contracts in the direction of its motion as it approaches the speed of light.

“I got nowhere in trying to grasp what he wanted me to,” Rothman recalled ruefully, and he lamented to Einstein that “the whole pad was full of mathematical symbols.” Einstein insisted that the math he was using was “quite trivial.” Rothman never understood the answer but he treasured the sheet that Einstein had covered in calculations, and his offspring later sold it for thousands of dollars to a collector.

The day before Einstein left the East End, Rothman came out to Nassau Point to see him off and he was presented with a new biography that had just come out, “Einstein: The Maker of Universes.” Einstein had inscribed it, in German: “May this book remind you of the happy times we spent together in the summer of 1939.” It was signed simply: “A. Einstein.”

Then, when Rothman took his hand to say good-bye, Einstein “put one arm affectionately around my shoulder and said, ‘You know, this has been one of the most beautiful summers of my whole life…’”

And to think it happened on Long Island.