"Who Got Einstein's Office"

[fiefoe]

Of course it depends on what names impress one, but one can't say this book doesn't try:

__ There is an exception in the person of T.S. Eliot. Eliot aside, the Institute...
__ The Institute collects Fields medalists like butterflies.
__ In the 1940s, Freeman Dyson and a bunch of his friends used to ride through the woods in an old Dodge convertible with the top down.

Ed Regis's language can be a bit, um, purple, (the title of Chapter 3 is 'The Grand High Exalted Mystical Ruler'), but his wide-eyed enthusiam for abstract thinking is fairly endearing.

• They want to comprehend why the physical universe is the way it is and why it works the way it does. The Institute exists to honor the arrogance of mind required of those who are immodest enough to think they can contribute to the task.
• Nature's elementary particles, protons and electrons, for example, have life spans that are virtually infinite, making these unseen entities more like Plato's Forms than they are like anything else.
  
• A particle once observed is a particle lost from further view.
  

Marcel Breuer, the Great Panic of 1873