cover image 112 Mercer Street: Einstein, Russell, Gdel, Pauli, and the End of Innocence in Science

112 Mercer Street: Einstein, Russell, Gdel, Pauli, and the End of Innocence in Science

Burton Feldman, , edited and completed by Katherine Williams. . Arcade, $24 (243pp) ISBN 978-1-55970-704-6

During the winter of 1943–1944, Albert Einstein met weekly with three other aging geniuses—philosopher Bertrand Russell, mathematician Kurt Gödel and physicist Wolfgang Pauli—in the study of his home at 112 Mercer Street in Princeton, N.J. Feldman (who died in 2003) and Williams (who chairs the English department at the New York Institute of Technology) admit early on that “[n]othing really emerged from their meetings, so far as we can tell.” What the authors present are illuminating biographical sketches of these men and their earlier, groundbreaking work. By 1943, the four European-born friends found themselves “sidelined and isolated” from the war effort, such as the atomic research at Los Alamos. To balance their stories, Feldman (The Nobel Prize ) and Williams also review Werner Heisenberg’s fission research in Nazi Germany and J. Robert Oppenheimer’s work as leader of the Manhattan Project. While the book adds nothing to current scholarship on these individuals, it sheds light on a moment when architects of the early 20th century’s most important discoveries in science and logic could only stand by and watch as their scientific discoveries directly affected the outcome of world events. (Aug. 20)