Science: Exile in Princeton

(See front cover)

The sun was shining, the air was like early summer last week on the campus of Princeton University. The duckboards which protect the feet of undergraduates and teachers from the mud and slosh of New Jersey winters were still in place along the paths, but earth smells arose from the drying ground, excited birds skittered in the shrubbery, squirrels chattered in the trees. Students went to classes without neckties, and in the afternoons an elderly man with soft, inquisitive eyes and a flowing halo of white hair ambled in & out of Fine Hall, pausing to admire the changing season. He had always felt close to Nature—ever since his unhappy childhood in Munich, his happy youth in Italy, his placid days in Switzerland when he worked for the Berne patent office and pondered the structure of the world.

On the bulletin board in Fine Hall this elderly man was listed as "A. Einstein," occupant of Room No. 215. A small brick building with heavy-paneled doors and antique lamps glowing dimly in the linoleum-floored corridors, Fine Hall-houses the mathematical contingent of Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study. The Institute, which soon will have buildings of its own, is a group of distinguished scholars who are subsidized so that they may pursue their own researches without the distraction of giving courses, preparing examinations, grading papers. Many of the Institute's members are Jewish exiles from Germany. Directed by Dr. Abraham Flexner, the Institute was started in 1933 with a $5,000,000 endowment from Louis Bamberger, retired Newark department store tycoon, and his sister, Mrs. Felix Fuld.

In Fine Hall last week there were whispered conferences and quiet telephone conversations. A surprise party was being planned for A. Einstein and another member of the Institute, Dr. Leopold Infeld. The mathematicians made great efforts to keep the party a secret from Dr. Infeld. It was not so difficult to keep it a secret from Dr. Einstein. On the day of the party this week a book† will be published of which Drs. Einstein & Infeld are coauthors, the first "popular" book on physics to which Albert Einstein has ever lent his name.

Collaborators. Co-author Infeld is a distinguished theoretical physicist in his own right. A tall, jovial man with irregular teeth and the lumpy physique of a sedentary scholar, he speaks English with a heavy accent, but fluently and well. Born 40 years ago in Cracow, Poland, he studied at Cracow's ancient university and in Berlin, lectured in Lwów, spent some years in England's Cambridge as a Rockefeller fellow, joined the Institute at Princeton in 1936. In Cambridge he helped Physicist Max Born, another German exile (now at Edinburgh), in the formulation of a field theory which bridges modern Quantum Mechanics and the 19th-Century electro-magnetic wave equations of Scotland's brilliant James Clerk Maxwell (TIME, Sept. 11, 1933).