It's 1946 at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, NJ, and gathered on one faculty, staff and board are: Albert Einstein; Kurt Godel; John von Neumann; J. Robert Oppenheimer; T. S. Eliot; Freeman Dyson; Wolfgang Pauli; David Bohm; Eugene Wigner; Hans Bethe; and Lewis L. Strauss. In other words, some of the oddest personalities and greatest minds of all time, never mind the age, in logic, physics, mathematics, computer science, and even literature all cloistered in the hothouse atmosphere of academia. The IAS was a unique institution, devoted to the pursuit of only abstract, not applied, thought--the Platonic Heaven of the title.
Mr. Casti takes advantage of this true-life cast of characters (though he does play fast and loose with the timelines in order to put them all in Princeton at the same time) in order to explore both the political and personality clashes of the day and, as the subtitle suggests, the profound implications of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle and Godel's Incompleteness Theorem for the notion that we can "know" the Universe around us. The politics basically pits men like von Neumann, Strauss and Edward Teller (off stage), who believe that America must develop and employ nuclear weapons to stop the Soviet Union, against those like Einstein and Oppenheimer who either had moral quibbles or Communist backgrounds or both. The personality brouhahas center around
(Reviewed:23-Feb-05)
Grade: (A-)
