"What mathematicians are doing is not anything I can understand or that they can explain to me," says Walzer.Sometimes, he says, it gets hostile. When they do get together, at meal times, there is little fraternising. The various disciplines tend to gather at separate, segregated tables Astrophysicists don't eat with art historians Philosophers do not dine with mathematicians. "At the institute what you get is isolated fiefdoms of excellence."The professors are left alone to follow their own star, explore the big ideas, immerse themselves in high theory and perhaps work on their put-downs ("So young and already so unknown," said Nobel-winner Wolfgang Pauli of a fellow physicist).But critics of the institute's aloof, lone-thinker philosophy say that it discourages valuable intellectual discourse between scholars in different fields. "Very little synergism occurs here," according to astronomer John Bachall, a member of the faculty for more than 30 years.
Eventually it did work in small-scale trials but the project was finally abandoned.Some believe that IAS could use a bit more nuttiness - Dyson once argued for "more crazy people at the institute" - and also a little more meeting of the minds. "This is not nuts, this is supernuts," said the mathematician Richard Courant, an expert on shock waves, after watching a model of the ship collapse on its launch pad. Freeman, who joined the IAS faculty in 1953 and is now an 82-year-old professor emeritus, is known for the range of his mind - theoretical mathematics, particle physics, astrophysics, nuclear engineering - his ability to explain complex science simply and a weakness for the imaginative and unconventional.Upholding the image of the eccentric scientist, he was once involved in trying to build a spaceship for the US Air Force that was powered by H-bombs - it would set off successive thermonuclear explosions in its wake and ride the shock waves through the cosmos. Three years later he led a faculty revolt that ousted Flexner as director.Einstein's major contributions to physics were behind him but his fame and prestige gave the institute recognition and a validation that down the decades brought many other f great minds to the place that Robert Oppenheimer, its director for 19 years, called "an intellectual hotel".Prominent among them was the Berkshire-born physicist Freeman Dyson, whose father, the composer Sir George Dyson, was music master at Rugby and director of the Royal College of Music.
"The pope of physics has moved and the United States will now become the centre of the natural sciences," said Einstein's friend, the French physicist Paul Langevin.His ardour was dampened almost immediately. It's absolutely impossible to make any exception which would inevitably bring him into public notice." Einstein was outraged - he wrote letters to friends from "Concentration Camp, Princeton" - and threatened to resign if Flexner didn't stop meddling in his affairs. In his zeal for intellectual solitude, Flexner intercepted an invitation for Einstein to dine with President Franklin Roosevelt at the White House and declined it for him, saying: "Professor Einstein has come to Princeton for the purpose of carrying on his scientific work in seclusion. "I am fire and flame for it," he said.He arrived in New York on the liner Westmoreland with his wife, Elsa, his secretary and his assistant in October 1933. He was also being heavily courted by universities, among them Madrid, Paris and Oxford, but when Flexner went to Germany and offered him $10,000 a year - more than three times what he asked for - Einstein enthusiastically signed on. Few understood what he was talking about but it didn't matter They knew it was important and he looked so right. With the mad hair, the soup-strainer moustache, the accent, the pipe and his engaging eccentricity - he refused to wear socks, even on the day he was sworn in as a US citizen - he was a cuddly caricature of the crazy genius.He had so captured the public imagination that they named cigars and babies after him, and the London Palladium offered the Elvis of science a three-week, name-your-own-terms engagement, though what he was supposed to do - play his violin? - wasn't clear.
