Customer Reviews

Who Got Einstein's Office? Eccentricity and Genius at the Institute for Advanced Study

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Who Got Einstein's Office offers an interesting look at Princeton's Institute of Advanced Study, the famous people that work(ed) there, as well as their work. The book seems to suggest that the tenured researchers at the Institute of Advanced Study have done their best work before they joined; That somehow at the Institute, they were isolated from a vibrant academic life, from contact with other researchers and students in their field, etc. As such, the book is definitely worth reading.

Having said that much, I feel that I should voice my indignation at the way the author depicted and presented one of the greatest lights of this century, the logician Kurt Goedel.

It's almost embarrassing to me to mention this, since Goedel's work -- profound and deep and beautiful, is what most people that remember Goedel at all remember him for. But Goedel apparently had some difficulties of an emotional and mental nature that effected his life -- from adolescence to adulthood, difficulties that the author, Ed Regis, finds the generousity to mock. In describing Goedel's relationship with his mother and the influence it had on his romantic life, Regis refers to Goedel as "Kurtele" -- a diminutive of Goedel's first name -- like turning a "Richard" into "little Dicky"... This is but an example. Regis goes to greater length to belittle Goedel and the appreciation of his work. This is beneath contempt. However bizzare and eccentric and troubled Goedel's life was, Goedel himself was its only victim. Goedel left the world precious gems of thought and changed the world of logic and mathematics forever. I think he deserves quite a bit more respect and compassion than Ed Regis afforded him.

It certainly doesn't have to be the case that if you don't respect someone you also don't understand his work. It's just ironic that the author, who refers to Goedel mockingly as "The Grand High Exalted Mystical Ruler", fails to understand even the most basic things about Goedel's work: The incompleteness result is described as "... the mathematical equivalent of the assertion that 'This statement is unprovable.'" What could be simpler? Add to this Goedel's own self-doubts, and the author now begins to wonder whether the incompleteness theorem isn't in fact a rather obvious and straightforward result.

But as the saying goes, "God is in the detail", and the author doesn't even begin to see the subtleties involved: Mathematics "talking about itself" -- Goedel numbering as a mechanism for mathematics to encode sentences about methematics, a mathematical proposition "refering to itself" -- indexicals, expessing "this" in thematics... As a consequence of "mathematics talking about itself" -- the effective computability of the provability predicate -- What Goedel did in fact is write a scanner, parser and interpreter in type theory -- all in 1931 -- twenty-something years before there were computers around, and people could write canners, parsers and interpreters for programming languages. And Goedel got them all right -- scanner, parser and interpreter -- written maticulously as recursive and primitive recursive functions. Merely envisioning these back in 1931 is a tramendous intellectual achievement.

Not having appreciated the depth of Goedel's contributions to logic, it's no wonder Regis doesn't appreciate Goedel's admirers: In describing a meeting between Rudolf Rucker and Kurt Goedel, Regis qoutes Rucker's words of appreciation of Goedel's understanding and insight into the problems he raised during their meeting: "perfect understanding", "informative laghter", ... to which Regis has to contribute: "Of course! Why not? We're not talking about talking about a man, after all, a mere mortal. We're talking about the Emperor of the Forms, the Grand High Exalted Mystical Ruler."

Well, shame on you Ed Regis!

A fine history of The Institute For Advanced Study, endowed as a place that would "permit a haven where scholars and scientists may regard the world and its phenomena as their laboratory without being carried off in the maelstrom of the immediate. . ."

A memorable series of oral histories / stories about the interaction of some of the 20th century's most famous theoretical physicists: Niels Bohr, Einstein, Max Planck, Lorentz, de Broglie and so many others who passed through the Institute. A fascinating look into the every day lives of some of the brightest stars in physics.

You don't need to know a thing about math or physics to enjoy this fine portrait of a fascinating group of minds at work and play.

I borrowed this book out of curiosity, got immediately engrossed, and it has been one of the few books I've read to completion recently. I then decided that I had to own my own copy.

Ed Regis manages to present a cross section of ground breaking 20th-century thinking in mathematics, physics and astrophysics via a series of mini biographies of the Institute for Advanced Study's most illustrious characters. Given the complexity of the subjects, the author did a splendid job of providing deep technical detail in a manner the uninitiated can grasp (oh sure, there are sections that might make ones eyes glaze over, but this makes the book more interesting for more advanced readers).

A great result of this book is that it whets the appetite to learn more about certain subjects, which will benefit new and used book sellers.

Lastly, the author strikes a balance between reverence for the Institute and its members, and candor in assessing their shortcomings.

Roger Benton

A very entertaining look at the history and personalities of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, at one time or another, home to 14 or more Nobel laureates. Learn how the Institute was created and how Einstein was recruited to be it's first member. Meet Godel, von Neumann, Dyson, Oppenheimer, Pauli, Witten and other luminaries up close and personal through their years at IAS, a place where these great minds have had no other duties or responsibilities than to explore new frontiers of thought and imagination. A very interesting look at the exotic, quirky, and sometimes downright nutty personalities of some of the greatest figures in science. A fast-paced read that I never found boring. Martin Gardner also gave it high praise.

If you are interested in what happened in the 20th century in science, technology, and ultimately history, then you will want to know what happened at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ in the 1930s - 1950s.

The array of talent at IAS from Einstein, Von Neumman, Godel, Pauli, and Dirac present at one-time was truly breathtaking.

This in my opinion is a poorly conceived and poorly edited work, and much of it is in very bad taste (as has been noted by a few reviewers already).

The basic narrative which underlies this book is the idea that the Institute and many of its illustrious theoretically-minded members, past and present, are blinded by a dogmatic, quasi-religious belief in Platonic idealism, and this threatens the continued creative vitality of the Institute. This is especially evident whenever Regis discusses the distinguished mathematicians of the place, who are more or less portrayed as bad guys throughout. But theoretical physicists also come in for plenty of scorn.

This theme is hammered and worn thin to the point of transparency, until it becomes clear that Regis has some sort of animus against "mainstream" theoreticians at the Institute. (Regis evidently likes some of the "mavericks", e.g., Freeman Dyson, Stephen Wolfram.) Read his portrayal -- more of a caricature really -- of a physics seminar talk given by Tim Morris (chapter 8), to get an idea. Followed by a rather tendentious description of the tenure of Carl Kaysen as Institute director, and what those dastardly Platonic mathematicians did to him. It goes on and on in that vein.

It's very tiresome, and it doesn't help that Regis has little understanding of or sympathy for the science he talks about. Numerous instances can be found throughout, but I'll give just one: his botched description of Planck's constant (he got the dimensions wrong). No writer who understood what he was writing about could make that mistake; it's on the order of writing E = m/c^2, the only difference being that Planck's constant is not so familiar to the general reader as Einstein's equation.

I don't understand how this book garners such good reviews (from Martin Gardner no less: could he have possibly read this book with any attention?!). I give it two stars, one for the catchy title, and the other for numerous anecdotes (but often in garbled telling).

I confess that I only read two chapters of this book before I decided that it was all that I could take.

Yes, Princeton's IAS was a place where extremely talented scientists congregated. All the same, what I read of this book was almost pathetic in the degree that the author doesn't as much describe the scientists there as people, as make them out to be a variety of superheros who must be described in adulatory, even groveling terms, an insult to their memories. Nor did I learn anything new - either in terms of science or biography - from the chapters I read; even worse, it was clear to me which books some, if not many, of the passages came from.

I wouldn't recommend this book.

I'm surprised I didn't know about this book sooner. It was published in 1988 and definitely deserves to be better known.

This is one of the more enjoyable books on the history of science I've read. It details the history of the Princeton Institute for Advanced study through the lives and careers of some of its most famous scions. There are chapters on Einstein, Kurt Goedel, Oppenheimer, John von Neumann (the inventer of the electronic computer), and Ed Witten, the author of the string theory, and many others.

The book is full of amusing and fascinating details and stories about the many famous and often eccentric scientists and mathematicians who worked in its cloistered halls. For example, referring to Einstein's eventual obsession about disproving the uncertainty aspect of quantum mechanics, Oppenheimer once said, "Einstein is cuckoo." Oppenheimer once learned Greek so that he could read classic literature in the original. Upon learning that several of his fellow scientists were meeting to discuss Italian literature, he learned enough of it in a month to start reading the books. Godel developed a paranoid delusion and spent his last months refusing any food, eventually starving himself to death, having become convinced that his doctors were trying to poison him.

Before Einstein came to the U.S., there was a movement in Germany against "Jewish physics." One hundred supposed scientists joined this group and once held an anti-Einstein meeting at a large auditorium, with thousands of people in attendence. Einstein himself went to the event just to see what the whole thing was about, and finding out of course that their objections were nonsense and "absurd," as Einstein said. But it was at that point that Einstein finally decided things were getting a little too overheated in the Fatherland and he finally left for the states--their loss and our gain.

Another funny thing about Einstein was just how crazy the public went over him. They named everything from their children to their boats after him. One time Einstein visited the famous biologist J.B.S. Haldane in England, and his daughter fainted dead away at the sight of him.

The public may not have really understood much about Einstein's new ideas--light having weight, space actually being curved, and so on--but all that mattered was that Einstein understood it. He was the prophet of a new world order and would revolutionize our understanding of reality with his unique genius, and the public was practically giddy as a schoolgirl about Einstein as a result.

There are many other interesting and funny stories about the lives of these emminent thinkers in the book, but I'll leave the rest for you to read for yourself. This book is definitely worth your time and money.

The title was very catchy, and with the photos of 4 geniuses - Einstein, Goedel, von Neumann, and Oppenheimer - on the cover one could be pardoned for having high expectations from the book.

Not a bad read but this is just an average book, and reads more like a journalist trying to put together the best he can about the various esoteric topics (this was 1986) being worked on at IAS and the personalities. The topics are either too many or too short, and run abruptly from one to the next.

A book of this kind, talking about an institution, should not cover too much about the topics themselves such as spin, fractals, superstrings, but focus more on how IAS has enabled the scientists to create such original things. Such a book should have many photographs of the building, rooms, people at work and also the personalities themselves. This book does not have a single photograph, beyond the cover photo, so it does not bring out the human element that well.

There is little I can understand about theoretical physics or much else that is pondered by the geniuses at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. However, Ed Regis does a great job of bringing these intellectual heroes down to a level that an average person can enjoy and understand. This was just a great bedtime read- Regis has the intellect to appreciate and understand these folks while able to tweak at their pettinesses and jealousies.