Einstein was among the first faculty members of the Institute for Advanced Study, which was founded in 1930 as an independent research center against the backdrop of fascism’s rise in Europe. He was a faculty member at IAS, which was initially housed at Princeton University, from 1933 to 1955, setting down roots in the town as he and the growing institution changed the trajectory of the modern world. This fall, I’m a visiting fellow at the institute, and the opportunity has inspired me to think about the wide range of subjects he explored while living here: not just his study of general relativity, quantum theory, and statistical mechanics, but also his devotion to the cause of human freedom. His critical optimism, rooted in a rigorous scientific worldview and a deeply humanistic sensibility, is imperiled today in a cultural moment marked by broad skepticism of scientific research and the promise of higher education. If we hope to revive and reclaim this persistent hope, his story—and the ethical vision it helps to illuminate—is a good place to begin.
The Princeton that Albert Einstein knew in 1933 was sharply divided by the color line; a long-established border—marked by Witherspoon, John, and Jackson Streets—separated its predominantly Black neighborhood from the rest of town. Einstein walked or biked across this divide often as he traveled through Princeton—he famously never learned to drive—and that journey was often accompanied by the voices of the children of Witherspoon, many of them yelling questions from bedroom windows.
Years later, in interviews recorded by the researchers Fred Jerome and Rodger Taylor, several of the men and women who once were those children offered lovely, vivid descriptions of their neighbor. Mercedes Woods describes his wild white hair and unlaced shoes; Shirl Gadson remembers his frequent walks and talks with her mother, Violet; Henry Pannell recalls Einstein giving out nickels to the neighborhood kids before sitting with Henry’s grandmother on the porch. Shirley Satterfield, a local legend and historian of African American life in Princeton, remembers meeting Einstein while spending the day with her mother, Alice, who worked as dining staff at IAS more than 70 years ago. When Shirley asked her mother what she and Einstein had talked about, she told her, simply, “the weather, or whatever.” His local reputation—as someone whom you could ask anything, anytime—was an outgrowth of his lived relationship with this community.