I suspect one of the longest lived names will be Julius Caesar; first his military and Roman history, then he is the name of a Shakespeare play which is a fame of its own, then he’s the name of the month July, and proxy related to August from Augustus Caesar. He’s the name of the Caesar Cipher in cryptography, and tangled up in the etymology of the Caesarian Section method of childbirth (which he probably didn’t have), the Caesar Salad (actually Caesar Cardini but often misunderstood (whom was the chef named after tho?)), and the German word Kaiser for Emperor e.g. Kaiser Wilhelm.

It’s a bit like if Martin Luther King became the dominant meaning of the word “King” and that became the reason “King” echoed down the centuries; famous things named after him so that everything King which isn’t named after him is often thought to be, or is a reminder of him.

In some animated cartoon, a character who sounds like a stereotype of an NYC construction worker complains to someone who cut the line: “Hey Copernicus! Navigate yourself to the back of the line!”

Most people don't understand special relativity, much less general (or the photoelectric effect) so it's not at all a given that Einstein will remain a household name.

Nowadays "Hitler" is the default bad guy but before him it was "Napoleon" in much of Europe, and before that "Pharaoh". I'm pretty sure the same will happen to $DEFAULT_SMART_GUY

We (collectively) remember Newton, even if the average person doesn't understand gravity beyond "keeps us on the ground" or calculus. We can go back thousands of years and we still remember Pythagoras.

Einstein's association with nuclear energy will be what keeps his memory alive.

I am not claiming that Einstein will be forgotten, only challenging the conjecture that he will be a figure well known and cited by the general public. I really doubt that most people on the street would remember even having heard of Newton, much less referring to him in any context.

Don’t worry, the same will be true of kardashians, probably sooner than It happens to Einstein.

I challenge the assumption that the average person associates nuclear energy with Einstein (or the other way around).

and I challenge the assumption that even physicists know much about gravity beyond "keeps stuff on the ground." We may have general relativity, but it somehow seems to miss something to say physical models of gravity are that well flushed. It doesn't explain something like 80-90% of the gross movements of large masses seen in the universe by astrophysicists. We know a heck of a lot more about the small scale.

But this is a silly point I'm making, I admit ;)

> Most people don't understand special relativity,

but most people recognize the formula E=MC^2 even if they don't know what it means, and can tell you the name of the dude sticking out his tongue in a picture.

Understanding someone's work is orthogonal to them being well known.

And hey, at least Einstein's equation is something Einstein was both responsible for and proud of - Schrödinger is famous for his thought experiment that's just supposed to show how ridiculous the Copenhagen interpretation is. In popular culture Schrödinger ends up standing for specifically the thing he disagreed with.

Archimedes?

Plato?