Nearly 50 years after his death and a century after the then unknown physicist started challenging doctrine and stretching brains with his ideas, Albert Einstein remains not just scientifically relevant but a multipurpose icon as well. If anything, his stature has grown over the decades, fed by a steady stream of books, pop-culture references, and posthumous appearances in commercials and on T-shirts, coffee mugs, and most anything else that will sit still long enough to be stamped with a photo and a quote. But the more we see that image, the less we seem to know about the real Einstein and the work that made him famous. Thanks in large measure to an ambitious publishing effort, a much more nuanced view of the greatest scientist of the 20th century is taking shape. The Einstein Papers Project, now in its eighth volume, will ultimately publish some 14,000 original documents in a planned 25 volumes. Early drafts of famous papers are allowing historians to track the development of his ideas (he didn't pluck them fully formed from the cosmos after all) and his voluminous correspondence reveals a real human being. As a powerful new exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History in New York shows, the Einstein that emerges is at once darker, richer, and infinitely more fascinating than the friendly icon we thought we knew. Einstein himself attributed his success to a slow start. "A normal adult never stops to think about problems of space and time," he once wrote. "But my intellectual development was retarded, as a result of which I began to wonder about space and time only when I had grown up." According to family tradition, recorded by Albert's sister Maja in an unpublished biography, her brother was unusual from the start. Though he showed a remarkable ability to focus on difficult tasks like building houses of cards, he was slow to develop and didn't start speaking until at least the age of 2 1/2. INSET: The Activist.