At the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, working together across different subject areas allows faculty members to come up with innovative solutions to problems. Photo: John Emerson
In the Oscar-winning film Oppenheimer, J. Robert Oppenheimer is seen wrestling with the deadly consequences of his team’s development of the atom bomb after hundreds of thousands of people are killed when it’s dropped on Japan during World War II.
After Los Alamos, Oppenheimer went on to become director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. There, he tried to come to grips with his part in developing the technology that threatened the very survival of humanity. He used his 20 years as director of the institute to gather and work with some of the world’s most brilliant minds, in part, to find a way to preserve humanity.
The Institute for Advanced Study had a starring role in the film Oppenheimer, which captured the Best Picture Oscar in 2024, prompting new interest in the work that’s being done there.
Some of the biggest achievements that came out of the institute include the development of the basis for modern computer architecture, essential contributions to the establishment of art history as a discipline in the United States, and more recently, the foundational science behind next-generation immunotherapies, including vaccines for pancreatic cancer and Covid-19.
The names of those who have worked at the institute, on a bucolic, 589-acre campus in Princeton, include some of the most illustrious scientists and thinkers the world has seen, such as Albert Einstein, who was a founding faculty member of the institute in 1930 and worked there until his death in 1955.
Albert Einstein at the institute’s Fuld Hall. Photo: Harry C. Dorer Photograph Collection/Charles F. Cummings NJ Information Center/Newark Public Library
This year is the 95th anniversary of the institute. It was founded by Louis and Caroline Bamberger (of the Bamberger’s department store, which later became Macy’s) with a $5 million gift in 1930, during the rise of fascism in Europe. The institute became a place of refuge for many of the European scholars whose lives were threatened by the Nazis, including Einstein and renowned mathematicians Oswald Veblen, Hermann Weyl and John von Neumann.
The Bamberger family’s intention was to use the institute to establish a “scholar’s paradise,” and Oppenheimer continued that mission during his two decades there.
Einstein and Oppenheimer in 1947. Photo: Universal History Archive/Getty Images
Preserving humanity
The institute was established in 1930 with 23 members; since then, its community of scholars has grown to include historians, mathematicians, natural scientists and social scientists. Now, a faculty of 30 permanent professors selects and mentors the roughly 200 members who arrive each year from around the world, with nearly half coming from more than 30 different countries.
While the faculty members are called professors, they don’t teach any classes. There are no degree programs, and research is never directed. Researchers are given the freedom to pursue their own goals. The purpose of the faculty is to be curious and explore whatever they wish to study in their fields, while mentoring the members. They are provided with housing, and a salary, and time to contemplate the world. The members (who are chosen by the faculty) stay for one to five years, while faculty members are permanent. Areas of research include historical studies, social science, natural science, which includes physics and astrophysics, systems biology and mathematics, including computer science.
David Nirenberg has been director and Leon Levy Professor at the institute since 2022 and wants to continue the important work for which Oppenheimer was known.
David Nirenberg, director of the Institute for Advanced Study. Photo: Courtesy of Sameer Khan/Institute for Advanced Study
In an interview in his office—the same one Oppenheimer once inhabited—Nirenberg sips mate (a South American drink that he acquired a taste for from his parents, who immigrated to the United States from Argentina) while he speaks about his predecessor’s legacy and the future of the institute.
“This is where Oppenheimer was trying to build a place where the world could learn to preserve humanity from the consequences of its own discoveries. And I think we’re still very much doing that. We’re at the cutting edge of computing and physics and mathematics and historical studies and social sciences,” he says.
Behind Nirenberg’s desk is a bookshelf that once housed a small safe where Oppenheimer kept the nuclear secrets locked up while he was director there. Nirenberg and his family live in the historic house on campus where Oppenheimer and his family once lived.
The director’s house, where J. Robert Oppenheimer once lived. Photo: John Emerson
Nirenberg is a historian and author who has written about the interaction of Christians, Jews and Muslims in medieval Europe and the Mediterranean.
He says that Oppenheimer’s second act, while he was director of the institute, was thinking about how human knowledge could help the world cope with the kinds of problems that human knowledge created. “What kind of research does it take to produce fundamental knowledge and to help society live with that knowledge? So he brought all these physicists together. He felt society needed a place where everyone could come together to think about the big problems.”
He believes the film Oppenheimer did a great job informing viewers about what the institute does. “It’s been very good for us. It showed that the institute is about discovering and thinking about the consequences of discovery. And that’s what Oppenheimer was wrestling with.”
Some of the research taking place there today includes studies of number theory, particle physics, history of capitalism, and AI and society. Faculty member Alondra Nelson is an acclaimed sociologist who examines science, technology and social inequality. She was deputy assistant to President Joe Biden and principal deputy director for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, where she supervised the creation of the Artificial Intelligence Bill of Rights of the Biden administration.
“She oversaw the federal government’s effort to figure out how humanity and technology can coexist, and that’s what she’s examining here now as well,” says Nirenberg. “We’re always focused on pure research on one hand, and the practical on the other hand.”
A scholars’ haven
The institute’s founders, including its first director, Abraham Flexner, wanted it to be a haven for scholars and scientists who were “afraid of no issue; yet it should be under no pressure from any side which might tend to force its scholars to be prejudiced either for or against any particular solution of the problems under study; and it should provide… the time requisite to fundamental inquiry into the unknown. Its scholars should enjoy complete intellectual liberty and be absolutely free from administrative responsibilities or concerns.”
By the mid-1930s, the institute had a faculty that included five of the world’s leading mathematicians and theoretical physicists. Among the first group of scholars were two women: algebraist Emmy Noether and topologist Anna Stafford, who wanted to study at Princeton University but was denied (she was sent a postcard saying, “We don’t take girls”). A graduate student at the University of Chicago, she was accepted as a postgraduate student at the institute, working at a secondary school in Mendham to support herself. When she was 95, she reflected on her years at the institute as “two years in heaven.”
In 1965, Thayyoor K. Radha, a physicist from India, was appointed as one of the earliest women of color at the institute.
Since its founding, the institute has become one of the world’s leading centers for curiosity-driven research, and a model for similar institutes that have since been created around the world, including the Paris Institute for Advanced Study and the Institute for Advanced Study at Tsinghua University in China.
Useful knowledge
At the time of its founding, the institute was groundbreaking (this was 1930, after all) for choosing individuals based on their abilities alone, with no regard to race, religion or gender.
The institute’s mission statement was to enable “the curiosity-driven pursuit of knowledge, with no view to its immediate utility or the expectation of meeting predetermined goals.”
In 1939, Flexner published an essay in Harper’s Magazine on “The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge,” where he presented the case for seemingly useless research, citing, among other examples, the abstract mathematics of non-Euclidean geometry, without which Einstein’s theory of relativity would have been impossible. (Nirenberg notes that, without this theory, we wouldn’t have GPS technology today.)
Observing that most of the great discoveries beneficial to humanity were made by men and women “driven not by the desire to be useful, but merely the desire to satisfy their curiosity,” he argued that “curiosity, which may or may not eventuate in something useful, is probably the outstanding characteristic of modern thinking. It is not new. It goes back to Galileo, Bacon, and to Sir Isaac Newton, and it must be absolutely unhampered.”
Nirenberg says much of the work being done at the institute today is foundational research, and he underscores the importance of this type of inquiry.
“This is a place that basically says, ‘We think you’re great. Your work is very promising. Come spend time here and follow your ideas.’ It isn’t always obvious what the utility of research is going to be. But without foundational research, the future has nothing to build on,” he says. He cites Michael Walzer (a professor emeritus there) who basically created the modern understanding of the ethics of war. “He’s a political theorist. He’s not out there working for the State Department; he’s studying long traditions of war. And then he produces a very influential book on how we should think about what’s ethical and not ethical in war.”
Walzer is now working on issues having to do with international justice and the connection between religion and politics.
Notable achievements
The institute has produced an exceptional record of achievement. Among its present and past faculty and members are 36 Nobel laureates, 46 Fields medalists for mathematical achievements, and 23 Abel Prize laureates (for mathematics), as well as many MacArthur fellows and Wolf Prize winners.
Sometimes, research that others may find to be useless turns out to be incredibly important.
In 1935, Albert Einstein, together with institute members Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen, conceived and wrote what became known as EPR, challenging science’s understanding of quantum theory. “EPR and other related papers from this time were largely ignored for 30 years, and people actually made fun of them,” says Nirenberg. “But then, they become absolutely key to what everyone today agrees is one of the great frontiers—and we as a country are investing billions of dollars in it to try to keep up with other powers,” he continues.
The beauty of the institute is that its faculty and members can work across the different schools and come up with important findings and results. Sometimes this takes place during the daily afternoon teas that bring the faculty and members together for free tea, coffee and cookies.
For instance, some physicists might hang out with a biologist and develop models that reveal how to create a pancreatic cancer vaccine. And that’s exactly what happened; the recent pancreatic cancer vaccine was largely developed at the institute.
Faculty and members work together to come up with important findings, such as the latest Covid vaccine. Photo: John Emerson
Or you might have a computer scientist and a statistical physicist thinking about how to create models to predict the evolution of viruses. “That’s how the computer program that decides what your Covid vaccine should look like in a year was designed here. In fact, it’s our most recent patent,” explains Nirenberg. “In order to predict viral evolution, you need both a very sophisticated computer model, lots of statistics, including biological statistics, and you need to know a lot about viruses. Those are all things that came together here.”
John von Neumann, a child prodigy from Hungary who could converse in ancient Greek at the age of six, accepted a professorship at the institute in 1933. An esteemed mathematician and physicist (a crater on the moon is named in his honor), he was a founding figure in computing and, at the institute, he developed the one of the first computers that stored both its data and its program in the same address space. This became the basis of most modern computer designs. “He created the logic that IBM put in all their computers until now. We didn’t patent that, unfortunately or deliberately. We published it so everyone could use it, but if we had patented it, we’d be the richest institution in the world, because it’s the most valuable intellectual property ever created,” says Nirenberg.
Grounds for inspiration
The pond used in the film Oppenheimer’s pivotal scene. Photo: John Emerson
In a pivotal scene in Oppenheimer, Einstein and Oppenheimer are seen standing in a grassy field next to the pond on the grounds of the institute discussing the development of the atom bomb—and the fate of the world.
That scene was shot on-site on the institute’s grounds, along with scenes in Oppenheimer’s office, which were actually filmed in Einstein’s original office, still in use today.
The original office where Albert Einstein once worked is still in use today at the institute. Photo: John Emerson
Located just a mile from Princeton University, the institute is an independent nonprofit and is not affiliated with the university; it’s run entirely on endowment returns, philanthropic support and grant funding. After it was created in 1930, the institute gradually acquired 589 acres of woods, wetlands and farmland, which are now preserved. These woods are open to the public and a popular spot for local walkers.
Many of the faculty and members of the institute also regularly take advantage of the woods’ natural beauty. In fact, the paths were blazed by the first professors there, Einstein and von Neumann. They even had a faculty wood-chopping committee at the time as well.
Even the beautiful grounds here can prove inspirational. In the 1970s, Henry Horn, the founding director of Princeton University’s Program in Environmental Studies, liked to take regular walks in the institute’s woods.
As a portion of the woods have never been farmed or logged, they provide a mixed landscape ideal for studies in the succession of trees. It was for exactly this reason that Horn used the woods to inform his predictive model for the stages of forest regeneration in 1975.
The result of this research was the first modern theory of forest succession and how forests grow. “It’s that curiosity about life and the world around you that made him want to do that,” Nirenberg says.
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