When I went to India on a two-week trip last March, ended up in a hospital there forcing my wife and BIL to fly in to get me back! Last July when we had big trip planned to go to Europe, we got into the plane, sat on the taxiway for 7 hours, only for the flight to be cancelled with the whole plan collapsing! Not giving up, we booked an all-inclusive resort vacation for five days between x-mas and new year, for our extended family of nine, thinking third time will be the charm. The reservations got totally messed up, thanks to a friend who was helping us with the booking process. Still managed to find alternate arrangements at the last minute and successfully boarded the plane with just one of us being slightly sick with cough/cold on Dec 25th. That virus turned out to be quite contagious, resulting in 7 out of the nine of us falling sick one after the other during this vacation! I set several new not so good records.
- Stayed in the room for the maximum time ever, thanks to spiking fever, body ache, cough, cold.
- With multiple buffets galore surrounding us, ate the least amount of food.
- Didn't swim in the resort pools even once,
- Didn't go to the gym or jog around the nice tracks they had around the Hacienda.
Guess we did our best to subsidize the facility for other patrons!
If you ask was there any upside to all this, it is the amount of undisturbed time I got to start and finish reading the book Who got Einstein's office? Eccentricity and genius at the institute for advanced study by Ed Regis. This is another book our family friend Sriram Tyagarajan loaned me along with The Idea Factory, I was writing about couple of months back. Similar to that book which talks about the Bell Labs as an institute, its culture, personalities and glory days, this fairly old publication that came out 1987, talks about the Institute for Advanced Study, located in Princeton, New Jersey. This is a more difficult one to write as a popular book since the institute and its residents are all dedicated to theoretical work in physics and mathematics, compared to Bell Labs that generated a ton of practical appliances that readers will be easily able to relate to. Still the author has done a splendid job.
As the author documents, The Institute was founded in 1930 with a brother and sister duo providing the funding while a gentleman named Abraham Flexner putting the whole concept together and also serving as is first director for several years. The institute was founded along the lines of Greek philosopher Plato's idea of an academy where you forget the existence of a real world but sit and think about the abstract concepts and principles that govern the entire universe.
Flexner reached out to Einstein, roping him in as the first permanent faculty for the institute. When Flexner asked how much of a salary he would expect, Einstein replied $3,000 per year and wondered if he could live on anything less than that. Of course, this is the 1930s and so $3,000 meant a lot but still it goes well with the principles of an academy where academics come in, not to earn a lot of money but to think about problems that govern the universe. Flexner apparently told him that the institute will actually pay him $10,000 a year, since the idea is to eliminate any real world worries from the faculty thus allowing them to work on their problems of choice undisturbed without any institute or family/personal pressures. I couldn't help relating this exchange to a recent article I read in which an actress claimed that the best move she has made in her career recently is firing her whole team because they did not get her multimillion-dollar deals based on a successful TV series character she had portrayed. It was an emotional and angry interview where she talked about women not getting paid well, and even when media reports that one received 10 million dollars, actually half the money goes to Uncle Sam, and you still need to pay your team from the remaining 5 million and so on. Of course, I totally support everyone getting paid equitably for their work. But you can't help comparing that article with Einstein's ask that sets the tone of the institute.
Over the decades the institute has hosted so many luminaries such as Kurt Gödel, John von Neumann, Dirac, Witten and Oppenheimer who served as its director for 16 years. Since I remain awe struck by the rate of growth in physics during the first half of the twentieth century, and have read several books on that topic, first half of the book that discusses developments in that time period in physics felt like a revision of what I had read in other books before. While I was settling into this notion that the whole book will continue repeating material I had read elsewhere, it pivoted into the story of John von Neumann building the first stored program computer and then into string theory, Astro physics, Mandelbrot sets, cellular automata, and so on very nicely. Though occasionally you come across sentences like, "Schwarz and Scherk realized that if the spin-2 particle predicted by string theory where in fact the graviton, then string theory would have the near miraculous result of requiring that gravitons existed, of necessitating them as an inescapable and ineradicable part of the theory, whereas all other quantum theories could not be made to accept gravitons through any amount of forcing, juggling, or mathematical hocus-pocus", overall the prose is very accessible, if you are interested in this material.
Reading about Regis' stories about von Neumann reminded me of this notion. Becoming world's best on anything, or even belonging to the top 0.01% of something is incredibly difficult. Think about being the best in playing violin or being the richest, fastest or one with most patents or any other skill/specialty we can think of. You have to be dedicated to doing just that one thing, that consumes all your energy and attention, invariably spoiling other aspects of your life. Even Einstein had marital/family life related difficulties. Since I am not cut out to be the world's best on anything, I generally tell myself and my kids that I'd rather be on the 90th percentile of four, five things that gives me a more balanced Life, covering health, wealth, happiness in career/family, etc. But as the author describes, John von Neumann comes across as an exception that excels in everything. He pioneered the idea of stored instruction architecture for computers, and actually built the first computer of this kind in IAS. It was a revolution (and a beautiful one at that) since computer hardware were usually built/connected to do specific type of computation at that time. One computer doing any kind of computation was unknown, and his effort set the standards for the model that is still in use. He was a gregarious person enjoying the company of others, throwing great parties while also being brilliant not only in physics but also in computer science and minting money easily out of his creations! Homer Simpson being cute-dumb as he always is, in one of The Simpsons episodes when offered a witness relocation program by the FBI, says, "Okay, I would like to be John Elway" (famous American Football player), forcing the FBI officer to explain that is not how the program works. If I can get in the program as Homer envisioned, probably I would like to be John von Neumann. 
I have read (and still have a copy of) Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions book, that came out in 1962. Decades back when I read it, I didn't find it that brilliant. When I said that to my grad school classmate Amit Nanavati, he was quite disappointed. Amit, being Amit, won't say "Idiot, go read it again". but that was the message. I liked this author's discussion of Kuhn's book and what a paradigm shift it was when it came out. Good nudge for me to go read it again, particularly since the book's main theme is understanding perspectives from the viewer's point of view (instead of from your current status of mind & experience). In its glory years many of the institute's scholars have been awarded the Nobel, path breaking work in the areas of particle physics and string theory has published papers dealing with 26 dimensions, reducing 40-page long math papers published to 4 page long newer, more elegant math papers and so on. The institute served as such an abode of theoretical work, Oppie serving as its director, once chided two young physicists who submitted their paper on Gravitation to a competition and won a $1000 prize, as Oppie thought such material pursuits shouldn't enter the minds [f the institute's scholars! From math to particle physics to Astro physics to computer science to history and humanities, contributions have been impressive to say the least. But visiting their website now, I don't see physics listed or highlighted as a big area of expertise anywhere!
Similar to the idea factory book about the Bell Labs, this one also argues that the institutes glory days are more in the past. Currently the older faculty who are there, come to the Institute for a few hours a day but are not producing a lot, basically resting on their old laurels. Newer younger ones don't find the place as attractive as it used to be anymore. One solution to this issue could be admitting PhD students who are guided by the older faculty, with the Institute starting to award PhD degrees. Though it was in the institute's charter, this institute never ever awarded even one degree till date. Though it was created in the mold of Plato's academy, where there are "no duties, but only opportunities", as Abraham Flexner used to say, keeping human beings motivated to produce the best quality work consistently continuously is quite difficult. People complain about how they are hard pressed for time in regular universities as they are burdened with teaching responsibilities and course material preparation and grading, guiding graduate students, leaving them with very little time for undisturbed research. But if they are put in a place like this institute that gives you the salary, breakfast & lunch every day, dinner twice a week and lets you do whatever you want without asking you to even write a report when your thumb is over, in the long run, people somehow don't find it that invigorating. Visiting the institute's website, we can find their mission listed this way:
The Institute is pledged to assemble a group of scientists and scholars who with their pupils and assistants may devote themselves to the task of pushing beyond the present limits of human knowledge and to training those who may "carry on" in this sense.
––Mission statement of the Institute for Advanced Study by founding Director Abraham Flexner, Organization Meeting, October 10, 1930
Such ideal versions of institutions being in existence close to a century is certainly admirable. Going back to the subject line of the email, these last 5 days gave me a small taste of how the life in The Institute will be. I had no responsibilities, didn't even have to take the dog for a walk, didn't have to cook, didn't go out of room much since I was sick. It gave me ample time to sit in the room, read this book, think about how string theorists are trying to "compactify" 26 dimensions in to 11 and actually finish it within the last 4 or 5 days while I normally would have taken a month to read such a piece. If I had to go through one round of sickness, perhaps this was the best way to do it since we didn't have to worry about food or washing clothes or feeding the dog or of any other such responsibilities. Since my wife had packed enough medication to take care of all our medicinal needs, we didn't have to rush out to any pharmacy or hospital either. But this may not be the life one would want to live permanently, even if you remove the sickness aspect. When I was a judge in a high school science competition, I remember a psychology professor commenting motivation is so hard. How true indeed! I hope the institute finds newer ways and personalities that will reinvigorate it all over again. If you find such books/institutes interesting, do check out book Complexity by Mitchell Waldrop about Santa Fe Institute as well.
Well, we are back home in Allentown and are all starting to feel a bit better, health wise, though we are not out of the woods yet. it is the end of the year. I recall someone remarking how new year celebration is "an extremely precise countdown to an arbitrary point in time"! Thus, though it may be irrational, I am going to carry a belief that all our travel nightmares will be over with 2023, and in the new year, we will have a fresh start with smooth and pleasant travels ahead!
Wish you a very happy, healthy, prosperous, wonderful 2024!
-sundar.
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