Time, Albert Einstein taught us, is not a fixed quantity. The faster you move, the more time slows down. Perhaps this concept has a cultural corollary pertaining to Einstein himself. Today we send pictures of Einstein whizzing around the world in seconds, yet his mass-media image remains a nearly timeless fixture. In photos and drawings, Einstein is almost always the detached, elderly professor with unruly white hair, a lined face, sloping shoulders, and a contemplative gaze, occasionally given to bemusement.

Indeed, the elderly Einstein is one of modernity’s essential icons. This Einstein is the oracle staring at us from the cover of Time magazine’s “Person of the Century” issue in 1999, the sage in Apple’s “Think Different” ad campaign, the wizened elder of classroom posters, postage stamps, and his own bobble-head doll. It is the Einstein currently greeting pedestrians from a large cartoon ad in Harvard Square, on behalf of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Casual observers could be forgiven for believing Einstein was born in front of an equation-filled chalkboard, wild hair and wrinkles already in place.

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.

Perhaps it’s understandable that we know the older Einstein so well, the Einstein renowned not only as a great scientist but a great humanitarian. After all, he posed for hundreds of photos during his years in America, from 1933, when he fled Nazi Germany, until his death in 1955. Many fewer photos, though the number is hardly negligible, remain from his years of scientific discovery. Still, it is worth asking what we’re missing as a result of this emphasis on the older man. Indeed, a case can be made that this focus on his last decades has clouded our understanding not only of who young Einstein was, but of who scientists are more generally, and how scientists work.

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In 1905, while working as a patent clerk in Bern, Einstein not only developed Special Relativitywhich posits that space and time are contingent upon the relative motion of observersbut also discovered the equivalence of matter and energy, better known by the equation E=mc2. An outsider in the world of physics, Einstein was acutely aware of the challenge of overturning entrenched beliefs. “He becomes sort of a teddy bear figure in his later years, but he’s tough as a young man,” says Galison. “He’s ambitious for his science, in a really ferocious way.”

After a concerted struggle, Einstein gained entry into academia in 1909. Still, the famous stories of Einstein’s early years, like the canard that he flunked math, reinforce the image of a daydreamer naturally possessing an intellect too powerful for ordinary institutions. “The elements in his youth that mesh well with the later Einstein are the ones that have really been promoted, to a degree by Einstein himself,” says Ole Molvig, a historian of science at Yale who studies the reception of Einstein’s work in Germany.

By 1916, when he presented the General Theory of Relativity, which describes gravity within his conception of a universal fabric of space-time, Einstein was a professor in Berlin. But he didn’t become front-page news until 1919when astronomical observations confirmed General Relativityand the first famous photo of Einstein, age 40, appeared on the front of the popular magazine Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung. “This is a dramatic picture, very different from what we think of as Einstein,” says Molvig.

But Germany was not especially conducive to scientific celebrity. When physicist Max Born put a frontispiece of Einstein in his own guide to relativity, colleagues revolted. “It was considered not something a scientist should have done,” Molvig notes. “It was quite unusual in a serious text to promote the idea of the individual.”

No such reservations existed in America, where Einstein’s fame soared after 1933, and the photos we still seefrom the serious Einstein, lost in thought, to the playful Einstein, on a bicycle or sticking out his tonguecirculated widely. One 1930s photo even shows Einstein holding an Einstein marionette, complete with white mane of haira kind of precursor of today’s bobble-head doll.

In 1946, when his portrait graced the cover of Time (he has appeared on the magazine’s cover five times) with the backdrop of an atomic blast and the superimposed equation E=mc2, Einstein’s public image had crystallized for good.

“Einstein on the cover of Time magazine in 1946 is still, I think, the single moment establishing this image,” says Alan J. Friedman, coauthor, with Carol C. Donley, of “Einstein as Myth and Muse,” a 1985 book about Einstein’s cultural impact. “Very old man, wild hair, representing the genius of science and its tragedy at the same time.”

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The picture may also have crystallized a general image of the scientist, one Friedman finds problematic. “It’s not just that he’s white and male,” says Friedman. “It’s also that Einstein is a super-genius, way above even normal geniuses. And therefore, can you really do science without being a super-genius? Can you just be ordinarily smart?” Today Friedman, as director of the New York Hall of Science, an interactive science and technology center, ponders ways to introduce children to science. Using Einstein as a human logo, he believes, “is very restrictive for kids growing up.”

Even where Einstein’s image is not present, its influence lingers. The famous American physicist Richard P. Feynman was also a combative, precocious talent who often appearsin his books, his own Apple “Think Different” ad, and the cover of James Gleick’s 1992 biography, “Genius”as an elder sage. And the sensational reception of Stephen Hawking’s books is impossible to imagine without the popular Einstein-based trope of the powerful scientific intellect, with minimal physical presence, divining the secrets of the stars.

Science is also more a young person’s pursuit than the Einstein imagery indicates. Many young scientists have shaken up modern physics: Werner Heisenberg was 25 when he arrived at the uncertainty principle, Paul Dirac was 26 when he created his famous equation linking Special Relativity and quantum mechanics. Satoshi Kanazawa, a psychologist at the London School of Economics, suggested in a 2003 paper that 80 percent of scientists make their greatest discoveries by their early 40s. Einstein himself spent his Princeton years fruitlessly laboring to unify relativity and quantum theory. “I have locked myself into quite hopeless scientific problems,” he wrote in 1935, the year he turned 56.

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That Einstein was laboring at all might surprise those who are only familiar with his mass-media image, which hides the exhausting process of trial and error at the heart of all science. As Roland Barthes once observed, the ubiquitous E=mc2 equation appears in Einstein cartoons like he has “just written on an empty blackboard, as if without preparation, the magic formula of the world.” Sure enough, E=mc2 hovers next to Einstein on the AAAS ad in Harvard Square today, like a wholly-formed idea floating in space, waiting to be grasped.

In reality, it was not until 1912, seven years after this particular discovery, that he settled on the precise letters we now see in the equation. “What he did was a lot of hard work,” notes Friedman. “It wasn’t just a flash of genius that created these theories.” Later in the 1910s, Einstein toiled relentlessly on General Relativity, and took a keen interest in seeing it verified experimentally.

And while Einstein worked in comparative isolation, photos from his last decades magnify the impression of solitary genius, often showing him working alone in a study or office. This was hardly Einstein’s working practice in his years of discovery. “He had a real scientific community in Berlin,” says Galison. To the extent that Einstein signifies physics today, images depicting him as a solitary scientist are even less representative of research in an era of big-science projects.

Even in 2005, which the UN has declared the “World Year of Physics” in commemoration of Einstein’s century-old breakthroughs, it is hard to reclaim the young man behind the scientific revolution. In front of me, I have a 2005 Einstein monthly calendar, produced by Avalanche Publishing in California. Ten of the 12 photos depict Einstein in his white-haired years. None date from 1905. Turning the pages of the calendar, time stands still, and Einstein remains the elder sage in perpetuity.