Nuts and Supernuts in the One True Platonic Heaven : WHO GOT EINSTEIN’S OFFICE? Eccentricity and Genius at the Institute for Advanced Study<i> by Ed Regis (Addison-Wesley: $17.95; 336 pp.) </i>

Ed Regis’ genuinely inspired and perfectly joyous “Who Got Einstein’s Office?” confirms beyond a doubt what anyone ever suspected about the inhabitants of the loftiest Ivory Towers, in this instance, the elite of one of America’s most august scientific institutions, which the author calls “The One True Platonic Heaven,” and what the world knows as The Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, N.J. What sets out to be a chronicle of the Institute since its well-heeled incorporation in 1930, in the hands of a wry and acute observer of the oddball condition and a science writer with a genius for bulldozing through dark thickets of scientific mumbo-jumbo, ends up almost magically as a barometric reading of the state (of the art) of science.

Welcome to the Monkey House, which down through the years has been tagged “an intellectual hotel,” “a nirvana for eggheads,” “a modern Utopia,” and, if you miss the point, “an intellectual Garden of Eden.” None of the sobriquets does the place justice, if Regis’ book is a guide. The Institute for Advanced Study was funded (by the dry-goods mogul Louis Bamberger and his sister Caroline Fuld) and founded by Abraham Flexner, an educational gadfly who eventually lost his marbles trying to cope with the egomaniacal, willful professors whom he hired, with the noble purpose to attend to the corporeal needs of its members “to such a degree that the only conceivable remaining activity was thinking,” according to the author. (It did so well at this, its very first professor, Albert Einstein, wrote letters with the return address, “Concentration Camp, Princeton.”) Not all scientists needed apply. The Institute was meant for purists, or “High Lonesomenesses,” as the author calls the most ethereal practitioners of mathematics, particle physics, astrophysics and the like who dwell in the nether galaxies of pure ideas for the sake of little besides purity itself. Or so Mr. Regis seems to imply in this carefully structured, wittily written history.

Only heretics, under conditions of absolute Platonic purity set-down at the Institute, dared to callous their hands on and sully their minds with such machinery as cyclotrons and telescopes. (Computers in present times seem to be the Institute’s only admissible hardware. Before their arrival, the heaviest equipment were blackboards and stalks of chalk.) And at first, along with Einstein came Kurt Godel, who was to logic and math what Einstein was to physics. Godel suited the Platonic mold even better than his immediate predecessor, and while he did wear socks and didn’t play the violin, Godel truly established the Institute as a home for oddballs ever after. What a brilliant description of Godel and his works. In this case, as in all other descriptions in the book, the author mercifully avoids serving up indigestible fodder, clearly and succinctly reducing complicated theories and phenomenon to the understandable without pandering. And quite a trick it is too, to describe without once losing the reader the seminal works of Godel and Einstein, Bohr, Max von Laue, I. I. Rabi, Frank Yang, T. D. Lee, Oppenheimer, Freeman Dyson, P. A. M. Dirac and Wolfgang Pauli, along with many lesser and greater, newer and dimmer lights who stayed for a while or their whole careers at “The One True Platonic Heaven.” In the process, Regis, a contributor to Omni magazine and a professor of philosophy at Howard University, reveals himself to be a science writer of the first magnitude.

After describing what he calls “The Priesthood of the Cosmos” (i.e. Einstein, Godel and some of the younger, present-day mathematical researchers of such oddments as “transcendentals,” a number which isn’t the root of any polynomial), you get the idea that the Institute is the Wild Kingdom of Wheel Spinning. The author quotes one math brain as saying, “In any field there is this pressure on you to publish papers, and--you know--if you happen to get some results, even if they say something strange about some objects that may be of no obvious interest, you want to publish in someplace.” Another present-day researcher explores Mandelbrot fractals (geometrical objects whose contours are irregular and spidery no matter what their scale) because “they are beautiful in their own right.”

There was a time not too long ago, when heretics roamed the Institute’s leafy, country club byways, and by heretic, one means most of all Johnny von Neumann, a giant of a fellow who lifted life by the ears and gave it a tremendous shake. There is a story that Von Neumann was indeed a demigod who had made a detailed study of humans and could imitate them perfectly. Born in Budapest, at age 6 he was joking with his father in ancient Greek. While still in his 20s, he conceived of the “Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics.” He helped invent the implosion mechanism for the first atomic bomb, then helped father the H-bomb, and later, to stave off boredom at the Institute (and to put a cat among the Purist pigeons), he created and built on the grounds the stored program computer, which everyone uses today. To top it all off, Von Neumann created the concept of the self-reproducing machine, and by figuring out the theory of this reproduction, he anticipated by four years Crick’s and Watson’s description of the DNA molecule. He was beyond brilliant and beyond the merely eccentric. He dressed like a banker, always, even while reining a horse down the Grand Canyon. Once on a trip to New York, he called his wife to ask her why he was going to New York.

Another of these heretics was J. Robert Oppenheimer, the “father of the atomic bomb,” Institute director from the late ‘40s until 1966, and the “Nim-Nim-Nim Man,” according to the author, for the guttural sounds he made while lecturing. For eccentricity, Oppenheimer once suggested that the Institute do away with its faculty. “Perhaps the truest Platonic Heaven of all would have no people , just a collection of wraiths,” the author follows on. Oppie’s tenure, more than any other, led to the “me-me” attitude among the faculty in which the spirit of cooperation painfully faltered.

However, the vision remains, and in Franz Moehn, the Institute’s chief, it is brighter than ever. The vision of the Platonic idea is carried on, as well, by Freeman Dyson, the most august of the Institute’s present faculty and a brilliant maverick who once went off to build a rocket ship which he planned to propel by H-bomb explosions. (“Zis is not nuts,” reported a German scientist who went to the testing site to observe Dyson’s invention. “Zis is supernuts.”) The vision of Von Neumann is carried on, on the Third Floor of Fuld Hall, two floors above where Einstein used to ponder his Unified Field Theory, where a couple of the Institute’s young physicists work at a B. C. Wills of Detroit roulette wheel purchased from Pauls Gaming Devices of Reno. God did not play dice with the universe (according to Einstein), but God didn’t have a B. C. Wills roulette wheel either.

While the Institute’s physicists and to a lesser degree, the mathematicians, are no longer up to the same snuff as they once were, the astrophysicists, a relatively new and unabashed group of scientists, are doing fine; in fact, the Institute today is arguably the world’s center for astrophysics. An evidently happy crowd who don’t take themselves too seriously, they ruminate about white dwarfs, extrasolar asteroids, red giants, star clusters and whatever else, all without the help of telescopes. The reporting of the book is excellent throughout, but nowhere better than on the astrophysicists and other present-day activities at the Institute. The author lets us look over their shoulders, sit in on their deliberations on the existence of a “Death Star,” cosmic “bubbles” on which the universe’s galaxies are distributed, and their fascination with automata--altogether a dazzling parade of the people and things of the state-of-the-art science’s state of the art. We participate in their practical jokes and jibes and witticisms, their in-fights, pettiness and peevishness, and even the slightly unusual manner in which they receive the announcement of a new baby (“What are the dimensions?” from an astrophysicist). This is wonderful stuff. And all the more so because it gives us a glimpse of ourselves at our very best, our most inventive, our most alive .

Near the conclusion, the author asks a vital, yet daring question. “What is it that all this scientific thinking and theorizing and calculating get us in the end?” What’s in the pay envelope, fellas? Most of the people at the Institute can’t decide, the author tells us, and the reply comes as no surprise. It seems that “truth” is considered these days to be an optional and gratuitous concept, and its pursuit leads in one instance, as good as another, to a crisp “neutrino martini” at the day’s weary end. And who can find fault with that, when a new world has been opened, explored and discovered to end in a fascinating cul-de-sac?

That’s civilization!

And who did get Einstein’s office, Room 115, at the Institute? Of course it must have been enshrined, you say? Well, not quite. An astronomer named Bengt Stromgren got it first, followed by a mathematician, Arne Beurling. But Einstein’s only love and greatest passion still washes the room late afternoons, almost as a reminder that the great man once did his thing there: light.