The Kitchen Sink
An occasional piece of paper
April 20, 2008
Vol. 11 no. 15

Everything But...
           In my search for Albert Einstein, he was nowhere to be found, but present everywhere. Straight across the street from my office in the center of Princeton is a small park with a monument and bust of the only Albert anyone recognizes here – not to be confused with Prince Albert.
           Fleeing the onset of the Nazis in Germany, Einstein was invited and welcomed to Princeton in the early 1930’s and lived here until he died in 1955. The house where he lived for 20 years is located at 112 Mercer Street, fittingly I believe, in the middle of the Protestant Princeton Theological Seminary, barely 3 blocks from where I sit. The house was never meant to be a shrine and has been owned by several professors since then; in fact, the little gate on the street has a small sign, “Private Residence.” Yet, it is listed on Princeton map everyone uses. Something is in the atmosphere, though, for two of its subsequent owners received the Nobel Prize – after they bought the house.
           The house that Einstein did build was the Institute of Advanced Studies about 2 km down the street. I visited there Wednesday a longtime friend and colleague, Witold Witakowski of Uppsala, Sweden (and originally Warsaw in the days of the Polish Solidarity Movement). Witold and his wife Ewa and I walked around the spacious grounds, around Einstein Drive, but the famous office of Albert is no longer there because of all the new buildings and construction since his death over 50 years ago.
           In latter years, Einstein was not so much a physicist, as a person who witnessed the divine lurking in the cosmos and in quantum theory of the atom, and gently told what he saw to all who had the ears to hear, and many still listen. Relatively, that is not a bad way to conclude your life.