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

As World War II wound down and it became increasingly clear that the Allies would emerge victorious, Albert Einstein invited three close friends-all titans of contemporary science and philosophy-to his home at 112 Mercer Street in Princeton, New Jersey, to discuss what they loved best, science and philosophy, and perhaps to ponder their vision of the postwar world. His guests were the legendary philosopher and pacifist Bertrand Russell; the boy wonder of quantum physics Wolfgang Pauli; and the brilliant logician Kurt Gödel, whose "incompleteness" theorems a decade before had shattered the link between logic and mathematics. Their casual meetings took place far from the horrific battlefields of the war and the (then) secret lair of experimental atomic physicists, Los Alamos, New Mexico. Just how many times they met and precisely what they discussed remains a matter of conjecture. All four men were well along in years by scientific standards-where youth tends to dominate with major breakthroughs-and they had to be aware of what Feldman terms "the pathos of science," that their own work would one day be superseded. As they met, they and their scientific brethren were awakening to the dire consequences of atomic power-as well as the fact that henceforth science and politics were inextricably intertwined. It was, as Feldman notes, the end of innocence in science. Taking these historic meetings as his starting point, Feldman sketches the lives and contributions of the four friends, colleagues, and rivals-especially Einstein, innately self-confident but frustrated in his attempt to come up with a unified theory, and the aristocratic but self-doubting Lord Russell. In a final section, Feldman also discusses the roles of J. Robert Oppenheimer and his German counterpart, Werner Heisenberg. Though neither was present at any of these meetings, they both cast long shadows over 112 Mercer Street during that cold winter of 1943-44.