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

• Author: Martin, Nicholas

Who Got Einstein's Office? Eccentricity and Genius at the Institute for Advanced Study. Ed Regis, Addison-Wesley, $17.95. Had anyone suggested a year ago that generalinterest books, by and about theoretical physicists would become wildly popular, the response would undoubtedly have been, "Surely you're joking." That changed when "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman," a humorous autobiographical work by Nobel laureate Richard Feynman, hit The New York Times's best-seller list. It wasn't the only one. Chaos, by James Gleick, made the best-seller list earlier this year; Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time entered its 29th week on the list in midNovember, at which time it was ranked number one. Regis's new work therefore has a well-tested market.

The book is a history of the Institute for Advanced Study, the private research institute founded in 1930 by Caroline Bamberger Fuld and her brother, Louis Bamberger, in Princeton, New Jersey. Not many people were in a position to make large philanthropic donations that year, but the Bambergers had just sold their highly profitable department store the summer before (they received their $25 million, much of it in cash, six weeks before Black Thursday). The Bambergers hoped the institute would be a haven where a select group of natural scientists, mathematicians, social scientists, and historians would spend their days thinking great thoughts, unmolested by the outside world. That has also meant unmolested by teaching (the institute has never conferred degrees); unmolested by grant-writing (a permanent member's salary today is about $90,000); and even unmolested by other institute members (there have been remarkably few collaborations at the institute).

The problem is that, after they arrive, the institute's great thinkers often stop producing great thoughts. One gets the impression that the institute hasn't been an "intellectual hotel" so much as a rest-home for geniuses. The first permanent member was Alber Einstein, whose fame was unrivaled, but whose best work was already behind him. Other geniuses followed. Kurt Godel, the mathematician popularized in Douglas Hofstadter's Godel, Escher Bach, came to the institute in 1940, but after his permanent appointment in 1953, he virtually stopped publishing. Not everyone fell asleep at the wheel. Wolfgang Pauli did important work on particle physics there. (Pauli won the Nobel prize...