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 (
Reviewed on: 06/18/2007
Genre: Nonfiction
Paperback - 256 pages - 978-1-61145-365-2