Who Got Einstein’s Office? by Ed Regis: book review

Who Got Einstein’s Office: Eccentricity and Genius at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study (1987) is a fascinating account of Albert Einstein’s time at the hallowed institute – and the scientists who were there with him, and a selection of those who followed him. 

Virtually all of the great figures of twentieth century physics and mathematics were there – for periods between one to two years – to conduct research – in fact, to do whatever they wanted. To the time of writing, the Institute of Advanced Study had employed and housed 14 Nobel Prize winners.

The Institute of Advanced Study (IAS) is located in Princeton, New Jersey, USA. It was established as a separate entity to the University of Princeton (not affiliated with it at all) in 1930. When it officially opened in 1933, and Albert Einstein moved in, it became the world centre for physics. With no students, no teachers, no classes, no laboratories, no machines, and no equipment – established for researchers to pursue pure theory – it became known as “an intellectual hotel.”

Albert Einstein, a German-born theoretical physicist, was already famous when he moved to Princeton at the age of 54 with his wife Elsa. He had already published his special theory in 1905, his general theory of relativity in 1915, and received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1921 at 42 years of age. So was Einstein merely appointed as “a figurehead, a living icon, a patron saint” of the IAS? Or did he actually achieve something of note?

Basically, light was Einstein’s specialty – light waves, to be specific. And his office caught the afternoon light through large bay windows. Best friends Einstein and Kurt Godel, an Austrian-born mathematician and logician who escaped the Third Reich in January 1940, remained in the town of Princeton until their deaths: Einstein for 22 years until his death in 1955, and Godel for 36 years until his death in 1978. And yes, someone did move into Einstein’s office, room number 115.

Regis documents the lives of some famous IAS residents: John Milnor and his work on transcendental numbers; “Good time Johnny” Neumann, the “human adding machine” who planned to build his own computer in 1946; J. Robert Oppenheimer, the “father of the atom bomb” during his directorship of the institute from 1946 to 1966; Freeman Dyson, the particle physicist, astrophysicist, theoretical mathematician and space travel dreamer; Paul Dirac, the reclusive English theoretical physicist; Stephen Wolfram in the 1980s who left in 1986 to run his own institute, the Centre for Complex Systems Research at the University of Illinois; and Ed Witten who prepared for a life time’s work on the subject of superstring theory.

Each of the scientists had their own uniquely absorbing tales. For example, John Neumann was granted $100,000 in 1946 to build his own computer. A year later his prototype was “fully automatic, digital, and all purpose” – and it worked. Other mathematicians at the IAS said that “there was never anything that we needed a lot of computing for” and viewed it merely as “the new electronic brain.” It is now on public display at the Smithsonian Institution.

The IAS was a man’s world. There is nothing in the Regis book on female scientists at the IAS, with the exception of Margaret Geller who provided a guest lecture on astrophysics in 1984 “fully armed … with slides, view-graphs, even a movie.” When Stephen Wolfram, the cellular automata and complex systems researcher, was asked whether he had a girlfriend, he answered, “Oh yes, if you’re interested in complex systems, there’s nothing more complex than that.”

The IAS was, in the end, a place of both success and failure for the Platonist Albert Einstein. “He wanted to get beyond the disorder of quantum mechanics and find a more stable reality beneath the observed phenomena, and here he was partially successful: the EPR (Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen) paradox has a life of its own today. He wanted to unify gravity and electromagnetism, and he certainly failed at that. And he wanted to install a world government upon earth that would ensure world peace, and he failed at that, too.”

And so, in the epilogue, Regis questions the IAS, once called the “One True Platonic Heaven,” and its value on current scientific research. The “fall from glory” has been characterized as “a mediocre spiral” in which the current stock of scientists would rather seek money and fame than undertake research, while others would rather work “in a real job” at a university. Regis added that “for a theorist … better to have a beautiful theory than to be twiddling your thumbs down in some salt mine waiting for a light to go on … for the eye of the theorist is ever on the Forms – the mathematical realities – whether they be at the bottom of matter, or at the edge of the universe.”

Who Got Einstein’s Office? is a work of literary art; fascinating, interesting, absorbing, and historically of critical importance in the evaluation of pure theory. For me, who began my scientific educational life in pure mathematical theory, could I be so bold or hubristic to say that Ed Regis has written the best book in the world! Theoretically speaking!

MARTINA NICOLLSis an international aid and development consultant, and the authorof:- Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom(2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).