Princeton University Quotes

In the view of such harmony in the cosmos which I, with my limited human mind, am able to recognize, there are yet people who says there is no God. But what makes me really angry is that they quote me for support of such views. (The Expanded Quotable Einstein, Princeton University, page 214)

In 2002, having spent more than three years in one residence for the first time in my life, I got called for jury duty. I show up on time, ready to serve. When we get to the voir dire, the lawyer says to me, “I see you’re an astrophysicist. What’s that?” I answer, “Astrophysics is the laws of physics, applied to the universe—the Big Bang, black holes, that sort of thing.” Then he asks, “What do you teach at Princeton?” and I say, “I teach a class on the evaluation of evidence and the relative unreliability of eyewitness testimony.” Five minutes later, I’m on the street. A few years later, jury duty again. The judge states that the defendant is charged with possession of 1,700 milligrams of cocaine. It was found on his body, he was arrested, and he is now on trial. This time, after the Q&A is over, the judge asks us whether there are any questions we’d like to ask the court, and I say, “Yes, Your Honor. Why did you say he was in possession of 1,700 milligrams of cocaine? That equals 1.7 grams. The ‘thousand’ cancels with the ‘milli-’ and you get 1.7 grams, which is less than the weight of a dime.” Again I’m out on the street.

When you are eighty years old, and in a quiet moment of reflection narrating for only yourself the most personal version of your life story, the telling that will be most compact and meaningful will be the series of choices you have made. In the end, we are our choices. —Jeff Bezos, commencement speech at Princeton University, May 30, 2010

Education,” said Dr. John G. Hibben, former president of Princeton University, “is the ability to meet life’s situations.

Barry L. Jacobs and colleagues from the neuroscience program at Princeton University showed that when mice ran every day on an exercise wheel, they developed more brain cells and they learned faster than sedentary controls. I believe in mice.

Adults are not supposed to play. We are supposed to stress, have worries and be too busy dealing with life's problems. But according to a study undertaken by Princeton University and led by Alan Krueger, Professor in Economics and Public Affairs there, we are happiest when we are involved in engaging leisure activities.

Princeton University recently did a study revealing what those of us paying attention already know all too well: The United States is, in scientifically proven fact, not a democracy. They concluded that the U.S. is controlled by economic elites.” This is a prominent idea that is becoming popular. The structural reason that voting is redundant is that through the funding of political parties, lobbying, and cronyism, corporations are able to ensure that their interests are prioritized above the needs of the electorate and that ideas that contravene their agenda don’t even make it into the sphere of public debate. Whoever you vote for, you’ll be voting for a party that represents a big-business agenda, not the will of the people.

The greatest thinkers in history certainly knew the value of shifting the mind into low gear. Charles Darwin described himself as a slow thinker. Einstein was famous for spending ages staring into space in his office at Princeton University.

A Princeton University scholar, Susan Fiske, has used scans to show that the brains of high-achieving people see images of poor people and process them as if they were not humans but things.

A recent landmark global study in population genetics by a team of internationally reputed scientists (as reported in The History and Geography of Human Genes, by Luca CavalliSforza, Paolo Menozzi and Alberta Piazzo, Princeton University Press) reveals that the people who inhabited the Indian subcontinent, including Europe, concludes that all belong to one single race of Caucasian type. This confirms once again that there really is no racial difference between north Indians and south Indian Dravidians.

Dei sub numine viget, Under God's power she flourishes

With a particular person in mind, or in anticipation of interacting with them, self-conception adjusts to create a shared reality. This means that when their perception of you is stereotypical, your own mind follows suit. For example, [Princeton University psychologist Stacey] Sinclair manipulated one group of women into thinking that they were about to spend some time with a charmingly sexist man. (Not a woman-hater, but the kind of man who thinks that women deserve to be cherished and protected by men, while being rather less enthusiastic about them being too confident and assertive.) Obligingly, the women socially tuned their view of themselves to better match these traditional opinions. They regarded themselves as more stereotypically feminine, compared with another group of women who were expecting instead to interact with a man with a more modern view of their sex. Interestingly, this social tuning only seems to happen when there is some sort of motivation for a good relationship. This suggests that close or powerful others in your life may be especially likely to act as a mirror in which you perceive your own qualities. (...) No doubt the female self and the male self can be as useful as any other social identity in the right circumstances. But flexible, context-sensitive, and useful is not the same as “hardwired”.

As Wilson mourned his wife, German forces in Belgium entered quiet towns and villages, took civilian hostages, and executed them to discourage resistances. In the town of Dinant, German soldiers shot 612 men, women, and children. The American press called such atrocities acts of "frightfulness," the word then used to describe what later generations would call terrorism. On August 25, German forces bean an assault on the Belgian city of Louvain, the "Oxford of Belgium," a university town that was home to an important library. Three days of shelling and murder left 209 civilians dead, 1,100 buildings incinerated, and the library destroyed, along with its 230,000 books, priceless manuscripts, and artifacts. The assault was deemed an affront to just to Belgium but to the world. Wilson, a past president of Princeton University, "felt deeply the destruction of Louvain," according to his friend, Colonel House; the president feared "the war would throw the world back three or four centuries.

But you don’t have to spend a week hiking in the forest to have your creativity nourished by the outdoors. Even a half-hour walk near your home, office, or school will do. Einstein made a habit of walking the mile and a half to and from his office at Princeton University every day. A little exercise, some fresh air, the passing of the seasons: it’s all fuel for your creative brain.

The slow overture of rain, each drop breaking without breaking into the next, describes the unrelenting, syncopated mind. Not unlike the hummingbirds imagining their wings to be their heart, and swallows believing the horizon to be a line they lift and drop. —Jorie Graham, from “Mind,” Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts. (Princeton University Press; First Edition edition June 21, 1980)

Moscow State University.”4 MGU was to the USSR what Harvard is to the United States—except that in the Soviet Union there was almost nothing else, no Yale, Princeton, or Stanford, no Ivy League, no equally distinguished state universities, no elite liberal arts colleges. Moscow the city was itself unique:

In an fMRI brain-scan experiment, researchers at Princeton University found that neural resonance disappears when people communicate poorly. The researchers could predict how well people were communicating by observing how much their brains were aligned. And they discovered that people who paid the most attention—good listeners—could actually anticipate what the speaker was about to say before he said it.

Philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah of Princeton University makes the point that, “In life, the challenge is not so much to figure out how best to play the game; the challenge is to figure out what game you are playing.

Generally places that are comfortable with excellence don’t call themselves centers of excellence. Has anyone heard of a Princeton University Center of Excellence? Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center of Excellence?

Animosity towards the automobile was so great that in 1906 Woodrow Wilson, then president of Princeton University, declared, “Possession of an auto car is such an ostentatious display of wealth that it will stimulate socialism.”16

when you eat sugar, according to research by Bartley Hoebel of Princeton University, it triggers a response in the same part of the brain—known as the “reward center”—that is targeted by cocaine, alcohol, nicotine, and other addictive substances.

atheistic regimes, such as communist China, communist Russia, and Nazi Germany is more than one hundred million people.32 There is no close second place. David Berlinski, a secular Jew who received his PhD from Princeton University, believes that one of the main reasons for such atrocities is the absence of ultimate accountability: “What Hitler did not believe and what Stalin did not believe and what Mao did not believe and what the SS did not believe and what the Gestapo did not believe . . . was that God was watching what they were

The Law of the Twelve Tables, a Roman legislation circa 450 BC, actually required a father to put to death any deformed child (Cito necatus insignis ad deformitatem puer esto). (Modern moral philosophers, like Joseph Fletcher and Princeton University’s Peter Singer, advocate the same thing.)

August 25, German forces began an assault on the Belgian city of Louvain, the “Oxford of Belgium,” a university town that was home to an important library. Three days of shelling and murder left 209 civilians dead, 1,100 buildings incinerated, and the library destroyed, along with its 230,000 books, priceless manuscripts, and artifacts. The assault was deemed an affront not just to Belgium but to the world. Wilson, a past president of Princeton University, “felt deeply the destruction of Louvain,” according to his friend Colonel House; the president feared “the war would throw the world back three or four centuries.

Here, dear reader, you must summon patient compassion. Try to imagine the hardships of a military officer triply burdened by close relationships with political leaders and the national news media, an Ivy League PhD, and wartime triumphs leading an elite airborne division. Our hero somehow survived in spite of it all. He rose against his handicaps, triumphing over the awful mark of Princeton University, that great gathering place for outcasts, rebels, and the socially obscure. He secured higher military rank even though he had been successful in combat. He adroitly worked CBS News, the Washington Post, and the United States Senate, yet still rose to prominence.

But they are turning not to politics as their lever but to social enterprise, to nonprofits, to advocacy, to business. They see that Wendy Kopp, who founded Teach for America in her dorm room at Princeton University, has had more impact on the education system than any current senator, and many have given up on political paths to change.

You see, that will start, for instance, with the recognition that what you call good is very bad for other people, or what they call good is very bad for you. So you come to the conclusion that they are human beings too and they must have their point of view as you have yours. And then you are already out of it, already static, already au dessus de la mêlée. Of course you can take such a standpoint illegitimately before you have gone through the turmoil, just in order to avoid the conflict; people sometimes like to play that stunt, but that has no merit and they are tempted all the time to climb down into the turmoil. But if you have gone through the turmoil, if you cannot stand you any more, if the unconscious itself spits you out, then life itself spits you out as old Jonah was spit out by the whale; and then it islegitimate that you contentedly sit on the top of life, having a look at it. Then you can congeal the pairs of opposites in a beautiful static structure. Jung, C. G.. Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939. Two Volumes: 1-2, unabridged (Jung Seminars) (p. 1110-1111). Princeton University Press.

Cambridge and Princeton physicist James Jeans wrote, “The stream of knowledge is heading toward a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a machine.

I entered Princeton University as a graduate student in 1959, when the Department of Mathematics was housed in the old Fine Hall. This legendary facility was marvellous in stimulating interaction among the graduate students and between the graduate students and the faculty. The faculty offered few formal courses, and essentially none of them were at the beginning graduate level. Instead the students were expected to learn the necessary background material by reading books and papers and by organising seminars among themselves. It was a stimulating environment but not an easy one for a student like me, who had come with only a spotty background. Fortunately I had an excellent group of classmates, and in retrospect I think the "Princeton method" of that period was quite effective.

ROBERT MASELLO is the author of many previous works of fiction and nonfiction, most recently the novels Blood and Ice and The Medusa Amulet. A native of Evanston, Illinois, he studied writing under the novelists Robert Stone and Geoffrey Wolff at Princeton, and has since taught and lectured at many leading universities. For six years, he was the visiting lecturer in literature at Claremont McKenna College. He now lives and works in Santa Monica,

New Rule: Now that liberals have taken back the word "liberal," they also have to take back the word "elite." By now you've heard the constant right-wing attacks on the "elite media," and the "liberal elite." Who may or may not be part of the "Washington elite." A subset of the "East Coast elite." Which is overly influenced by the "Hollywood elite." So basically, unless you're a shit-kicker from Kansas, you're with the terrorists. If you played a drinking game where you did a shot every time Rush Limbaugh attacked someone for being "elite," you'd be almost as wasted as Rush Limbaugh. I don't get it: In other fields--outside of government--elite is a good thing, like an elite fighting force. Tiger Woods is an elite golfer. If I need brain surgery, I'd like an elite doctor. But in politics, elite is bad--the elite aren't down-to-earth and accessible like you and me and President Shit-for-Brains. Which is fine, except that whenever there's a Bush administration scandal, it always traces back to some incompetent political hack appointment, and you think to yourself, "Where are they getting these screwups from?" Well, now we know: from Pat Robertson. I'm not kidding. Take Monica Goodling, who before she resigned last week because she's smack in the middle of the U.S. attorneys scandal, was the third-ranking official in the Justice Department of the United States. She's thirty-three, and though she never even worked as a prosecutor, was tasked with overseeing the job performance of all ninety-three U.S. attorneys. How do you get to the top that fast? Harvard? Princeton? No, Goodling did her undergraduate work at Messiah College--you know, home of the "Fighting Christies"--and then went on to attend Pat Robertson's law school. Yes, Pat Robertson, the man who said the presence of gay people at Disney World would cause "earthquakes, tornadoes, and possibly a meteor," has a law school. And what kid wouldn't want to attend? It's three years, and you have to read only one book. U.S. News & World Report, which does the definitive ranking of colleges, lists Regent as a tier-four school, which is the lowest score it gives. It's not a hard school to get into. You have to renounce Satan and draw a pirate on a matchbook. This is for the people who couldn't get into the University of Phoenix. Now, would you care to guess how many graduates of this televangelist diploma mill work in the Bush administration? On hundred fifty. And you wonder why things are so messed up? We're talking about a top Justice Department official who went to a college founded by a TV host. Would you send your daughter to Maury Povich U? And if you did, would you expect her to get a job at the White House? In two hundred years, we've gone from "we the people" to "up with people." From the best and brightest to dumb and dumber. And where better to find people dumb enough to believe in George Bush than Pat Robertson's law school? The problem here in America isn't that the country is being run by elites. It's that it's being run by a bunch of hayseeds. And by the way, the lawyer Monica Goodling hired to keep her ass out of jail went to a real law school.

On hearing about powerful love, respond, be moved like an aesthete. Only, fortunate as you’ve been, remember how much your imagination created for you. This first, and then the rest—the lesser loves— that you experienced and enjoyed in your life: the more real and tangible. Of loves like these you were not deprived — C.P. Cavafy, “Hearing of Love,” Collected Poems. Translated by Edmund Keeley & Philip Sherrard. Edited by George Savidis. Revised Edition. (Princeton University Press 1992)

THOMAS JEFFERSON LEFT POSTERITY an immense correspondence, and I am particularly indebted to The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, published by Princeton University Press and first edited by Julian P. Boyd. I am, moreover, grateful to the incumbent editors of the Papers, especially general editor Barbara B. Oberg, for sharing unpublished transcripts of letters gathered for future volumes. The goal of the Princeton edition was, and continues to be, “to present as accurate a text as possible and to preserve as many of Jefferson’s distinctive mannerisms of writing as can be done.” To provide clarity and readability for a modern audience, however, I have taken the liberty of regularizing much of the quoted language from Jefferson and from his contemporaries. I have, for instance, silently corrected Jefferson’s frequent use of “it’s” for “its” and “recieve” for “receive,” and have, in most cases, expanded contractions and abbreviations and followed generally accepted practices of capitalization.

When Marian Anderson, the black contralto, came to Princeton for a concert in 1937, the Nassau Inn refused her a room. So Einstein invited her to stay at his house on Mercer Street, in what was a deeply personal as well as a publicly symbolic gesture. Two

There’s a widespread conviction, spoken and unspoken, that the road to riches is trimmed in Ivy and the reins of power held by those who’ve donned Harvard’s crimson, Yale’s blue and Princeton’s orange, not just on their chests but in their souls. No one told that to the Fortune 500. They’re the American corporations with the highest gross revenues. The list is revised yearly. As I write this paragraph in the summer of 2014, the top ten are, in order, Wal-Mart, Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Berkshire Hathaway, Apple, Phillips 66, General Motors, Ford Motor, General Electric and Valero Energy. And here’s the list, in the same order, of schools where their chief executives got their undergraduate degrees: the University of Arkansas; the University of Texas; the University of California, Davis; the University of Nebraska; Auburn; Texas A&M; the General Motors Institute (now called Kettering University); the University of Kansas; Dartmouth College and the University of Missouri–St. Louis. Just one Ivy League school shows up.

The Wall Street-based international banks created spies to march in protection of their profits. The armies turned against their masters. They decided they could create their own wealth and power. New York is crumbling. The Pentagon is stronger than ever. Yale, Harvard, Princeton and the top eastern universities haven’t produced a new idea or a constructive change for all their classical education. They have been swallowed by the Pentagon and spy contracts. The USA looks like a dance of death in every major city.

Carnegie dreamed up the Hero Fund himself. For all his ruthlessness as a businessman, he had a soft spot for civility. He disdained football as a sport for savages, so he donated a lake to Princeton University to give athletes another outlet. He was a pacifist and railed against the traditional definition of heroes as warriors. “The false heroes of barbarous man are those who can only boast of the destruction of their fellows,” he wrote. “The true heroes of civilization are those alone who save or greatly serve them.

It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.” —Albert Einstein, in a letter March 24, 1954; from Albert Einstein, the Human Side, Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffman, eds., Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1981, p. 43.

Be near me" Be near me now, My tormenter, my love, be near me— At this hour when night comes down, When, having drunk from the gash of sunset, darkness comes With the balm of musk in its hands, its diamond lancets, When it comes with cries of lamentation,                                              with laughter with songs; Its blue-gray anklets of pain clinking with every step. At this hour when hearts, deep in their hiding places, Have begun to hope once more, when they start their vigil For hands still enfolded in sleeves; When wine being poured makes the sound                                              of inconsolable children                       who, though you try with all your heart,                                              cannot be soothed. When whatever you want to do cannot be done, When nothing is of any use; —At this hour when night comes down, When night comes, dragging its long face,                                              dressed in mourning, Be with me, My tormenter, my love, be near me.              Faiz Ahmed Faiz, The True Subject. Translated by Naomi Lazard. (Princeton University Press. 1987)

After examining 1,799 policy issues in detail, two eminent researchers, Princeton professor Martin Gilens and Professor Benjamin Page of Northwestern University, concluded that “the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.

A political science professor and Princeton University president before his election as U.S. president, Wilson had fallen under the spell of a quite different political tradition from American republicanism. He had learned German to read philosopher G.W.F. Hegel and his followers, and he embraced their concept of the Rechtsstaat, whose ideology replaces “the contract theory of the origin of the state” with the idea that the function of the state is not to protect individual rights but rather to take “general care for the interests of the community,” as the University of Chicago’s hugely influential political science chairman Charles Merriam had put it in 1903.

[Paul Olum] was president of the University of Oregon when he heard of [Richard] Feynman’s death. He realized that the young genius he had met at Princeton had become a part of him, impossible to extricate. “My wife died three years ago, also of cancer,” he said. ... I think about her a lot. I have to admit I have Dick’s books and other things of Dick’s. I have all of the Feynman lectures and other stuff. And there are things that have pictures of Dick on them. The article in Science about the Challenger episode. And also some of the recent books. I get a terrible feeling every time I look at them. How could someone like Dick Feynman be dead? This great and wonderful mind. This extraordinary feeling for things and ability is in the ground and there’s nothing there anymore. It’s an awful feeling. And I feel it—— A lot of people have died and I know about it. My parents are both dead and I had a younger brother who is dead. But I have this feeling about just two people. About my wife and about Dick. I suppose, although this wasn’t quite like childhood, it was graduate students together, and I do have more—— I don’t know, romantic, or something, feelings about Dick, and I have trouble realizing that he’s dead. He was such an extraordinarily special person in the universe. Gleick, James (2011-02-22). Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman (p. 145). Open Road Media. Kindle Edition.

In 1947 Bohm accepted an assistant professorship at Princeton University, an indication of how highly he was regarded, and there he extended his Berkeley research to the study of electrons in metals. Once again he found that the seemingly haphazard movements of individual electrons managed to produce highly organized overall effects. Like the plasmas he had studied at Berkeley, these were no longer situations involving two particles, each behaving as if it knew what the other was doing, but entire oceans of particles, each behaving as if it knew what untold trillions of others were doing. Bohm called such collective movements of electrons plasmons, and their discovery established his reputation as a physicist.

The CRT is really hard. But here’s the strange thing. Do you know the easiest way to raise people’s scores on the test? Make it just a little bit harder. The psychologists Adam Alter and Daniel Oppenheimer tried this a few years ago with a group of undergraduates at Princeton University. First they gave the CRT the normal way, and the students averaged 1.9 correct answers out of three. That’s pretty good, though it is well short of the 2.18 that MIT students averaged. Then Alter and Oppenheimer printed out the test questions in a font that was really hard to read—a 10 percent gray, 10-point italics Myriad Pro font—so that it looked like this: 1. A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? The average score this time around? 2.45. Suddenly, the students were doing much better than their counterparts at MIT.

So much is spoken about wasting one’s life. But the only life wasted is the life of one who so lived it, deceived by life’s pleasures or its sorrows, that he never became decisively, eternally, conscious of himself as spirit, as self, or, what is the same, he never became aware- and gained in the deepest sense the impression- that there is a God there and that ‘he’, himself, his self, exists before this God, which infinite gain is never come by except through despair.

There is an old debate," Erdos liked to say, "about whether you create mathematics or just discover it. In other words, are the truths already there, even if we don't yet know them?" Erdos had a clear answer to this question: Mathematical truths are there among the list of absolute truths, and we just rediscover them. Random graph theory, so elegant and simple, seemed to him to belong to the eternal truths. Yet today we know that random networks played little role in assembling our universe. Instead, nature resorted to a few fundamental laws, which will be revealed in the coming chapters. Erdos himself created mathematical truths and an alternative view of our world by developing random graph theory. Not privy to nature's laws in creating the brain and society, Erdos hazarded his best guess in assuming that God enjoys playing dice. His friend Albert Einstein, at Princeton, was convinced of the opposite: "God does not play dice with the universe.

Lederman is also a charismatic personality, famous among his colleagues for his humor and storytelling ability. One of his favorite anecdotes relates the time when, as a graduate student, he arranged to bump into Albert Einstein while walking the grounds at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. The great man listened patiently as the eager youngster explained the particle-physics research he was doing at Columbia, and then said with a smile, “That is not interesting.

How has my industry raised prices at this rate without improving the product? At a few elite institutions, including NYU, we’ve leveraged scarcity. More than a business strategy, it’s become a fetish—believing you are a luxury brand instead of a public servant. Ivy Leagues have acceptance rates of 4–10%. A university president bragging about rejecting 90% of applicants is tantamount to a homeless shelter taking pride in turning away 90% of the needy that arrive each night. And this is not about standards or brand dilution. In an essay explaining his decision to stop conducting application interviews for his alma mater, Princeton, journalist Bryan Walsh observed, “The secret of elite college admissions is that far more students deserve to attend these colleges than are admitted, and there is virtually no discernible difference between those who make it and the many more who just miss out.” In support, he offered this statement from Princeton’s own dean of admissions: “We could have admitted five or six classes to Princeton from the [applicant] pool.”4 So, with a $26 billion endowment, the question becomes, Why wouldn’t you?

Einstein also became a supporter of racial tolerance. When Marian Anderson, the black contralto, came to Princeton for a concert in 1937, the Nassau Inn refused her a room. So Einstein invited her to stay at his house on Mercer Street, in what was a deeply personal as well as a publicly symbolic gesture. Two years later, when she was barred from performing in Washington’s Constitution Hall, she gave what became a historic free concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Whenever she returned to Princeton, she stayed with Einstein, her last visit coming just two months before he died.63 One

For instance, let us assume you live in a time when the static principle is ruling. There you will find mystics, and the mystics themselves are then the ones who are suppressed by the static principle, and they begin to boil, to move-with no clear ideas, but they move, they are alive. It is typical for the mystics that they live; their most characteristic quality is the intensity of their liveslife counts with them. They are a reaction against the static principle. But in a time when mysticism is really living, as it is now, movement prevails. We live in such a period and we are looking for a static system in which to find peace. And we are going to create one, for after a time of turmoil we are longing for rest, for sleep, even for a kind of suffocation after that eternal boiling and vibrating. You see, it is always a question of one-sidedness. When the static principle goes too far there will be an uprush of dynamic movement, or if you have the contrary, then that will create its compensation. That is the mechanism in this chapter: it is like a piece of life. Jung, C. G.. Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939. Two Volumes: 1-2, unabridged (Jung Seminars) (p. 1108-1109). Princeton University Press.

Another motive [to commit fraud] may be the fraudster’s pathologically mistaken views on what science is about. The immunologist and Nobelist Sir Peter Medawar has argued, perhaps counter-intuitively, that scientists who commit fraud care too much about the truth, but that their idea of what’s true has become disconnected from reality. ‘I believe,’ he wrote, ‘that the most important incentive to scientific fraud is a passionate belief in the truth and significance of a theory or hypothesis which is disregarded or frankly not believed by the majority of scientists – colleagues who must accordingly be shocked into recognition of what the offending scientist believes to be a self-evident truth.’103 The physicist David Goodstein agrees: ‘Injecting falsehoods into the body of science is rarely, if ever, the purpose of those who perpetrate fraud,’ he suggests. ‘They almost always believe that they are injecting a truth into the scientific record … but without going through all the trouble that the real scientific method demands.’104 104. Medawar, The Strange Case of the Spotted Mice , p. 197. 103. David Goodstein, On Fact and Fraud: Cautionary Tales from the Front Lines of Science (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010): p. 2.

Holding a precious book meant to Mendel what an assignment with a woman might to another man. These moments were his platonic nights of love. Books had power over him; money never did. Great collectors, including the founder of a collection in Princeton University Library, tried in vain to recruit him as an adviser and buyer for their libraries—Jakob Mendel declined; no one could imagine him anywhere but in the Café Gluck. Thirty-three years ago, when his beard was still soft and black and he had ringlets over his forehead, he had come from the east to Vienna, a crook-backed lad, to study for the rabbinate, but he had soon abandoned Jehovah the harsh One God to give himself up to idolatry in the form of the brilliant, thousand-fold polytheism of books. That was when he had first found his way to the Café Gluck, and gradually it became his workplace, his headquarters, his post office, his world. Like an astronomer alone in his observatory, studying myriads of stars every night through the tiny round lens of the telescope, observing their mysterious courses, their wandering multitude as they are extinguished and then appear again, so Jakob Mendel looked through his glasses out from that rectangular table into the other universe of books, also eternally circling and being reborn in that world above our own.

Eminent Princeton physicist John Wheeler has for years been insisting that when observing light from a distant quasar that’s bent around a foreground galaxy so that it had the possibility of appearing on either side of that city of suns, we have effectively set up a quantum observation but on an enormously large scale. It means, he insists, that the measurements made on an incoming bit of light now determine the indeterminate path it took billions of years ago. The past is created in the present. This of course recalls the actual quantum experiments outlined in our earlier chapters, where an observation right now determines the path its twin took in the past.

When we think of discrimination, these are types of ugly, virulent prejudice that we think about. But John faced a much different kind of prejudice when he entered the job market as a new minted PhD in 1995. Although he applied to more than 150 academic jobs and had completed several field experiments, he was given only one interview. He later discovered that other nearly identical applicants received thirty interviews from just forty or so applications. The main difference between John and these other applicants was that John received his PhD from the University of Wyoming whereas they have received theirs from "brand-name" schools like Harvard and Princeton.

In 1994 another bombshell was dropped. Edward Witten of Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study and Paul Townsend of Cambridge University speculated that all five string theories were in fact the same theory-but only if we add an eleventh dimension. From the vantage point of the eleventh dimension, all five different theories collapsed into one! The theory was unique after all, but only if we ascended to the mountaintop of the eleventh dimension. In the eleventh dimension a new mathematical object can exist, called the membrane (e.g., like the surface of a sphere). Here was the amazing observation: if one dropped from eleven dimensions down to ten dimensions, all five string theories would emerge, starting from a single membrane. Hence all five string theories were just different ways of moving a membrane down from eleven to ten dimensions. (To visualize this, imagine a beach ball with a rubber band stretched around the equator. Imagine taking a pair of scissors and cutting the beach ball twice, once above and once below the rubber band, thereby lopping off the top and bottom of the beach ball. All that is left is the rubber band, a string. In the same way, if we curl up the eleventh dimension, all that is left of a membrane is its equator, which is the string. In fact, mathematically there are five ways in which this slicing can occur, leaving us with five different string theories in ten dimensions.)

Einstein went on to Princeton, where he delivered a weeklong series of scientific lectures and received an honorary degree “for voyaging through strange seas of thought.” Not only did he get a nice fee for the lectures (though apparently not the $15,000 he had originally sought), he also negotiated a deal while there that Princeton could publish his lectures as a book from which he would get a 15 percent royalty.47 At the behest of Princeton’s president, all of Einstein’s lectures were very technical. They included more than 125 complex equations that he scribbled on the blackboard while speaking in German. As one student admitted to a reporter, “I sat in the balcony, but he talked right over my head anyway.

You see, the word passio means suffering, and the German word Leidenschaft has been explained by a poet in a very nice way: Leidenschaft ist das was Leid schafft, passion is that which creates suffering. Leidenschaft is really sufferingness. That is the Buddhistic explanation too: the desirousness, the concupiscentia, of man, creates the great suffering of the world. This passio, then, is the flame which turns man into ashes if he exposes himself to it. But Nietzsche did not. He avoided it, and I cannot blame him, for if anybody can avoid the fire he is very wise to do so. Now, there is another saying of Jesus, similar to those found at Oxyrhynchus, which is not in the Canon. It runs: Whoever is close to me is close to the fire.[3] That means that whoever is close to Christ, is close to Christ's passio, and is apt to have Christ's own psychology and the same fate. He was the one who took up his passio. He submitted to it and suffered correspondingly, and whoever is close to him will do the same. This is exceedingly intelligent and exceedingly true, and would therefore have been abolished if the father of the church who quoted it had not been too stupid to understand it. [3] "Jesus says: "He who is near me is near the fire, and he who is far from me is far from the Kingdom." See Apocrypha, for Origen on Jeremiah, p. 35· Jung, C. G.. Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939. Two Volumes: 1-2, unabridged (Jung Seminars) (p. 340). Princeton University Press.

WRITING GUIDES AND REFERENCES: A SELECTIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY The Artful Edit, by Susan Bell (Norton) The Art of Time in Memoir, by Sven Birkerts (Graywolf Press) The Writing Life, by Annie Dillard (Harper & Row) Writing with Power, by Peter Elbow (Oxford University Press) Writing Creative Nonfiction, edited by Carolyn Forché and Philip Gerard (Story Press) Tough, Sweet and Stuffy, by Walker Gibson (Indiana University Press) The Situation and the Story, by Vivian Gornick (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) Intimate Journalism: The Art and Craft of Reporting Everyday Life, by Walt Harrington (Sage) On Writing, by Stephen King (Scribner) Telling True Stories, edited by Mark Kramer and Wendy Call (Plume) Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, by Anne Lamott (Pantheon) The Forest for the Trees, by Betsy Lerner (Riverhead) Unless It Moves the Human Heart, by Roger Rosenblatt (Ecco) The Elements of Style, by William Strunk, Jr., and E. B. White (Macmillan) Clear and Simple as the Truth, by Francis-Noel Thomas and Mark Turner (Princeton University Press) Word Court, by Barbara Wallraff (Harcourt) Style, by Joseph M. Williams and Gregory G. Colomb (Longman) On Writing Well, by William Zinsser (Harper & Row) The Chicago Manual of Style, by University of Chicago Press staff (University of Chicago Press) Modern English Usage, by H. W. Fowler, revised edition by Sir Ernest Gowers (Oxford University Press) Modern American Usage, by Wilson Follett (Hill and Wang) Words into Type, by Marjorie E. Skillin and Robert M. Gay (Prentice-Hall) To CHRIS, SAMMY, NICK, AND MADDIE, AND TO TOMMY, JAMIE, THEODORE, AND PENNY

The fantastic is what carries a person into the infinite in such a way that it only leads him away from himself and thus prevents him from coming back to himself. [...] When the will becomes fantastic, the self is similarly increasingly volatized. [...] Now if possibility outstrips necessity, the self runs away from itself so that it has no necessity to return to. [...] Surely what the self now lacks is actuality; [...] [b]ut on closer examination, what the self really lacks is necessity. [...] What is really missing is the strength [...] to yield to the necessary in one's self, what might be called one's limits. [...] [T]he misfortune is that he did not become aware of himself, that he is a quite definite something. [...] Instead, through this self's fantastically reflecting itself in possibility, he lost himself.

One day during the 1930s, Einstein invited Saint-John Perse to Princeton to find out how the poet worked. “How does the idea of a poem come?” Einstein asked. The poet spoke of the role played by intuition and imagination. “It’s the same for a man of science,” Einstein responded with delight. “It is a sudden illumination, almost a rapture. Later, to be sure, intelligence analyzes and experiments confirm or invalidate the intuition. But initially there is a great forward leap of the imagination.”16 There was an aesthetic to Einstein’s thinking, a sense of beauty. And one component to beauty, he felt, was simplicity. He had echoed Newton’s dictum “Nature is pleased with simplicity” in the creed he declared at Oxford the year he left Europe for America: “Nature is the realization of the simplest conceivable mathematical ideas.

5. Move toward resistance and pain A. Bill Bradley (b. 1943) fell in love with the sport of basketball somewhere around the age of ten. He had one advantage over his peers—he was tall for his age. But beyond that, he had no real natural gift for the game. He was slow and gawky, and could not jump very high. None of the aspects of the game came easily to him. He would have to compensate for all of his inadequacies through sheer practice. And so he proceeded to devise one of the most rigorous and efficient training routines in the history of sports. Managing to get his hands on the keys to the high school gym, he created for himself a schedule—three and a half hours of practice after school and on Sundays, eight hours every Saturday, and three hours a day during the summer. Over the years, he would keep rigidly to this schedule. In the gym, he would put ten-pound weights in his shoes to strengthen his legs and give him more spring to his jump. His greatest weaknesses, he decided, were his dribbling and his overall slowness. He would have to work on these and also transform himself into a superior passer to make up for his lack of speed. For this purpose, he devised various exercises. He wore eyeglass frames with pieces of cardboard taped to the bottom, so he could not see the basketball while he practiced dribbling. This would train him to always look around him rather than at the ball—a key skill in passing. He set up chairs on the court to act as opponents. He would dribble around them, back and forth, for hours, until he could glide past them, quickly changing direction. He spent hours at both of these exercises, well past any feelings of boredom or pain. Walking down the main street of his hometown in Missouri, he would keep his eyes focused straight ahead and try to notice the goods in the store windows, on either side, without turning his head. He worked on this endlessly, developing his peripheral vision so he could see more of the court. In his room at home, he practiced pivot moves and fakes well into the night—such skills that would also help him compensate for his lack of speed. Bradley put all of his creative energy into coming up with novel and effective ways of practicing. One time his family traveled to Europe via transatlantic ship. Finally, they thought, he would give his training regimen a break—there was really no place to practice on board. But below deck and running the length of the ship were two corridors, 900 feet long and quite narrow—just enough room for two passengers. This was the perfect location to practice dribbling at top speed while maintaining perfect ball control. To make it even harder, he decided to wear special eyeglasses that narrowed his vision. For hours every day he dribbled up one side and down the other, until the voyage was done. Working this way over the years, Bradley slowly transformed himself into one of the biggest stars in basketball—first as an All-American at Princeton University and then as a professional with the New York Knicks. Fans were in awe of his ability to make the most astounding passes, as if he had eyes on the back and sides of his head—not to mention his dribbling prowess, his incredible arsenal of fakes and pivots, and his complete gracefulness on the court. Little did they know that such apparent ease was the result of so many hours of intense practice over so many years.

It is the best of times in physics. Physicists are on the verge of obtaining the long-sought theory of everything. In a few elegant equations, perhaps concise enough to be emblazoned on a T-shirt, this theory will reveal how the universe began and how it will end. The key insight is that the smallest constituents of the world are not particles, as had been supposed since ancient times, but “strings”—tiny strands of energy. By vibrating in different ways, these strings produce the essential phenomena of nature, the way violin strings produce musical notes. String theory isn’t just powerful; it’s also mathematically beautiful. All that remains to be done is to write down the actual equations. This is taking a little longer than expected. But, with almost the entire theoretical-physics community working on the problem—presided over by a sage in Princeton, New Jersey—the millennia-old dream of a final theory is sure to be realized before long. It is the worst of times in physics. For more than a generation, physicists have been chasing a will-o’-the-wisp called string theory. The beginning of this chase marked the end of what had been three-quarters of a century of progress. Dozens of string-theory conferences have been held, hundreds of new Ph.D.’s have been minted, and thousands of papers have been written. Yet, for all this activity, not a single new testable prediction has been made; not a single theoretical puzzle has been solved. In fact, there is no theory so far—just a set of hunches and calculations suggesting that a theory might exist. And, even if it does, this theory will come in such a bewildering number of versions that it will be of no practical use: a theory of nothing. Yet the physics establishment promotes string theory with irrational fervor, ruthlessly weeding dissenting physicists from the profession. Meanwhile, physics is stuck in a paradigm doomed to barrenness.

A 2011 study done by Alan Krueger, a Princeton economics professor who served for two years as the chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, and Stacy Dale, an analyst with Mathematica Policy Research, tried to adjust for that sort of thing. Krueger and Dale examined sets of students who had started college in 1976 and in 1989; that way, they could get a sense of incomes both earlier and later in careers. And they determined that the graduates of more selective colleges could expect earnings 7 percent greater than graduates of less selective colleges, even if the graduates in that latter group had SAT scores and high school GPAs identical to those of their peers at more exclusive institutions. But then Krueger and Dale made their adjustment. They looked specifically at graduates of less selective colleges who had applied to more exclusive ones even though they hadn’t gone there. And they discovered that the difference in earnings pretty much disappeared. Someone with a given SAT score who had gone to Penn State but had also applied to the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League school with a much lower acceptance rate, generally made the same amount of money later on as someone with an equivalent SAT score who was an alumnus of UPenn. It was a fascinating conclusion, suggesting that at a certain level of intelligence and competence, what drives earnings isn’t the luster of the diploma but the type of person in possession of it. If he or she came from a background and a mindset that made an elite institution seem desirable and within reach, then he or she was more likely to have the tools and temperament for a high income down the road, whether an elite institution ultimately came into play or not. This was powerfully reflected in a related determination that Krueger and Dale made in their 2011 study: “The average SAT score of schools that rejected a student is more than twice as strong a predictor of the student’s subsequent earnings as the average SAT score of the school the student attended.

Now he comes to the explanation of the Pale Criminal; hitherto he speaks simply of the criminal. The paleness comes from the fact that the man was made pale by an idea; he begins to think over what he has done, and he gives it a name. You remember we came across this idea before; it was represented as a particular mistake to give a name to your virtues. Of course, unavoidably you will do so; you don't live your virtues simply as the recognition of an indescribable something about yourself which has value, but say it is this or that, and so you give it a name and make it exclusive and cause trouble-quarrels, conflicts between duties and between virtues. While if you have not given it a name, you will have retained the value. So you cause a conflict by giving names, but one cannot see how to do otherwise. The criminal has to give it a name, then. He adopts an idea about his deed and says he has done so and so, and then cannot stand it because he sees himself with ten thousand pairs of eyes. For a name is a collective thing, a word in everybody's mouth. He has heard that word from ten thousand other mouths already; when he says to himself that he has committed a murder, he sees it in printed letters in the newspaper, and what he has done is just that awful thing which is called murder. While if he did not give it a name, it would have remained his individual deed, his individual experience, which is not expressed by the collective noun murder. Such a criminal usually says: "I just beat him over the head, or "I put a knife into him," or "I wanted to tell him something and I put a bullet into him, and afterwards they said he was dead." You see, it was an individual series of events which were not named. Even the premeditated murder is very often accounted for in such a way: "I simply had to give that fellow something to make him quiet because I wanted to get at such and such a thing; naturally I had to shove him aside. And then it turned out that he was dead." That is the way such people use a revolver-as a means to change something. It is a sort of aftereffect or a concomitant circumstance that a corpse was left. How awkward! That it is murder only dawns upon them a long time afterwards when they are told. Then they realize it and get pale, but as long as somebody simply has been removed, well, it was awkward that he was found afterwards with a fractured skull, but that does not make one pale: it is simply regrettable. Jung, C. G.. Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939. Two Volumes: 1-2, unabridged (Jung Seminars) (p. 469-470). Princeton University Press.

Consider, for example, how the following verse (4:34) regarding the obligations of men toward women has been rendered into English by two different but widely read contemporafirst is from the Princeton edition, translated by Ahmed Ali; the second is from Majid Fakhry’s translation, published by New York University: Men are the support of women [qawwamuna ‘ala an-nisa] as God gives some more means than others, and because they spend of their wealth (to provide for them). . . . As for women you feel are averse, talk to them suasively; then leave them alone in bed (without molesting them) and go to bed with them (when they are willing). Men are in charge of women, because Allah has made some of them excel the others, and because they spend some of their wealth. . . . And for those [women] that you fear might rebel, admonish them and abandon them in their beds and beat them [adribuhunna]. Because of the variability of the Arabic language, both of these translations are grammatically, syntactically, and definitionally correct. The phrase qawwamuna ‘ala an-nisa can be understood as “watch over,” “protect,” “support,” “attend to,” “look after,” or “be in charge of” women. The final word in the verse, adribuhunna, which Fakhry has rendered as “beat them,” can equally mean “turn away from them,” “go along with them,” and, remarkably, even “have consensual intercourse with them.” If religion is indeed interpretation, then which meaning one chooses to accept and follow depends on what one is trying to extract from the text: if one views the Quran as empowering women, then Ali’s; if one looks to the Quran to justify violence against women, then Fakhry’s.translators of the Quran.

I do not know the substance of the considerations and recommendations which Dr. Szilárd proposes to submit to you,” Einstein wrote. “The terms of secrecy under which Dr. Szilárd is working at present do not permit him to give me information about his work; however, I understand that he now is greatly concerned about the lack of adequate contact between scientists who are doing this work and those members of your Cabinet who are responsible for formulating policy.”34 Roosevelt never read the letter. It was found in his office after he died on April 12 and was passed on to Harry Truman, who in turn gave it to his designated secretary of state, James Byrnes. The result was a meeting between Szilárd and Byrnes in South Carolina, but Byrnes was neither moved nor impressed. The atom bomb was dropped, with little high-level debate, on August 6, 1945, on the city of Hiroshima. Einstein was at the cottage he rented that summer on Saranac Lake in the Adirondacks, taking an afternoon nap. Helen Dukas informed him when he came down for tea. “Oh, my God,” is all he said.35 Three days later, the bomb was used again, this time on Nagasaki. The following day, officials in Washington released a long history, compiled by Princeton physics professor Henry DeWolf Smyth, of the secret endeavor to build the weapon. The Smyth report, much to Einstein’s lasting discomfort, assigned great historic weight for the launch of the project to the 1939 letter he had written to Roosevelt. Between the influence imputed to that letter and the underlying relationship between energy and mass that he had formulated forty years earlier, Einstein became associated in the popular imagination with the making of the atom bomb, even though his involvement was marginal. Time put him on its cover, with a portrait showing a mushroom cloud erupting behind him with E=mc2 emblazoned on it. In a story that was overseen by an editor named Whittaker Chambers, the magazine noted with its typical prose flair from the period: Through the incomparable blast and flame that will follow, there will be dimly discernible, to those who are interested in cause & effect in history, the features of a shy, almost saintly, childlike little man with the soft brown eyes, the drooping facial lines of a world-weary hound, and hair like an aurora borealis… Albert Einstein did not work directly on the atom bomb. But Einstein was the father of the bomb in two important ways: 1) it was his initiative which started U.S. bomb research; 2) it was his equation (E = mc2) which made the atomic bomb theoretically possible.36 It was a perception that plagued him. When Newsweek did a cover on him, with the headline “The Man Who Started It All,” Einstein offered a memorable lament. “Had I known that the Germans would not succeed in producing an atomic bomb,” he said, “I never would have lifted a finger.”37 Of course, neither he nor Szilárd nor any of their friends involved with the bomb-building effort, many of them refugees from Hitler’s horrors, could know that the brilliant scientists they had left behind in Berlin, such as Heisenberg, would fail to unlock the secrets. “Perhaps I can be forgiven,” Einstein said a few months before his death in a conversation with Linus Pauling, “because we all felt that there was a high probability that the Germans were working on this problem and they might succeed and use the atomic bomb and become the master race.”38

Generally places that are comfortable with excellence don’t call themselves centers of excellence. Has anyone heard of a Princeton University Center of Excellence? Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center of Excellence?

Pomeranz, K. (2000) The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the making of the modern world economy, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.

Peter Singer, a moral philosopher and professor at Princeton University points out, however, that there are in fact three freedoms at stake here: the freedom to donate blood for no financial reward, the freedom to sell blood, but also the freedom to give blood as a priceless gift whose value hinges solely on the need of the recipient, because it cannot be bought.14

Martin and Rae find an elevator bank. One of the doors is gold-colored (it’s bronze, actually). A placard says it leads to the Georgia Cancer Center of Excellence. Generally, places that are comfortable with excellence don’t call themselves centers of excellence. Has anyone heard of a Princeton University Center of Excellence? Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center of Excellence?

How to Find a Habitable Planet, which was published in 2010 by Princeton University Press.

Male valedictorians attended Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT, and Stanford. Only one woman chose an Ivy League university-Cornell.

So the way to think about the problem is this. You and I and computers and bacteria and viruses and everything else material are made of molecules and atoms, which are themselves composed of particles like electrons and quarks. Schrodinger's equation works for electrons and quarks, and all evidence points to its working for things made of these constituents, regardless of the number of particles involved. This means that Schrodinger's equation should continue to apply during a measurement. After all, a measurement is just one collection of particles (the person, the equipment, the computer...) coming into contact with another (the particle or particles being measured). But if that's the case, if Schrodinger's math refuses to bow down, then Bohr is in trouble. Schrodinger's equation doesn't allow waves to collapse. An essential element of the Copenhagen approach would therefore be undermined. So the third question is this: If the reasoning just recounted is right and probability waves don't collapse, how do we pass from the range of possible outcomes that exist before a measurement to the single outcome the measurement reveals? Or to put it in more general terms, what happens to a probability wave during a measurement that allows a familiar, definite, unique reality to take hold? Everett pursued this question in his Princeton doctoral dissertation and came to an unforeseen conclusion.

Consider, for example, how the following verse (4:34) regarding the obligations of men toward women has been rendered into English by two different but widely read contemporary translators of the Quran. The first is from the Princeton edition, translated by Ahmed Ali; the second is from Majid Fakhry’s translation, published by New York University: Men are the support of women [qawwamuna ’ala an-nisa] as God gives some more means than others, and because they spend of their wealth (to provide for them).… As for women you feel are averse, talk to them suasively; then leave them alone in bed (without molesting them) and go to bed with them (when they are willing). Men are in charge of women, because Allah has made some of them excel the others, and because they spend some of their wealth.… And for those [women] that you fear might rebel, admonish them and abandon them in their beds and beat them [adribuhunna]. Because of the variability of the Arabic language, both of these translations are grammatically, syntactically, and definitionally correct. The phrase qawwamuna ’ala an-nisa can be understood as “watch over,” “protect,” “support,” “attend to,” “look after,” or “be in charge of” women. The final word in the verse, adribuhunna, which Fakhry has rendered as “beat them,” can equally mean “turn away from them,” “go along with them,” and, remarkably, even “have consensual intercourse with them.” If religion is indeed interpretation, then which meaning one chooses to accept and follow depends on what one is trying to extract from the text: if one views the Quran as empowering women, then Ali’s; if one looks to the Quran to justify violence against women, then Fakhry’s.

MOHAMMED’S BIOGRAPHER He was an evangelical pastor, but not for long. Religious orthodoxy was not for him. An open-minded man, a passionate polemicist, he traded the church for the university. He studied at Princeton, taught in New York. He was a professor of Oriental languages and author of the first biography of Mohammed published in the United States. He wrote that Mohammed was an extraordinary man, a visionary blessed with irresistible magnetism, and also an impostor, a charlatan, a purveyor of illusions. But he thought no better of Christianity, which he considered “disastrous” in the epoch when Islam was founded. That was his first book. Later on, he wrote others. In the field of Middle Eastern affairs, few academics could compare. He lived indoors surrounded by towers of strange books. When he wasn’t writing, he read. He died in New York in 1859. His

They tried to bury us. They didn’t know we were seeds.” —Mexican proverb There are some secrets we don’t share because they’re embarrassing. Like that time I met Naval Ravikant (page 546) by accidentally hitting on his girlfriend at a coffee shop? Oops. Or the time a celebrity panelist borrowed my laptop to project a boring corporate video, and a flicker of porn popped up—à la Fight Club—in front of a crowd of 400 people? Another good example. But then there are dark secrets. The things we tell no one. The shadows we keep covered for fear of unraveling our lives. For me, 1999 was full of shadows. So much so that I never wanted to revisit them. I hadn’t talked about this traumatic period publicly until April 29, 2015, during a Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything). What follows is the sequence of my downward spiral. In hindsight, it’s incredible how trivial some of it seems. At the time, though, it was the perfect storm. I include wording like “impossible situation,” which was reflective of my thinking at the time, not objective reality. I still vividly recall these events, but any quotes are paraphrased. So, starting where it began . . . It’s the beginning of my senior year at Princeton University. I’m slated to graduate around June of 1999. Somewhere in the next six months, several things happen in the span of a few weeks. First, I fail to make it to final interviews for McKinsey consulting and Trilogy software, in addition to others. I have no idea what I’m doing wrong, and I start losing confidence after “winning” in the game of academics for so long. Second, a long-term (for

Anyone who saw Albert Einstein trudging along the sidewalks of Princeton University with a briar pipe hanging out of his mouth might have assumed the odd fellow in the old, frumpy overcoat and socks that didn’t match was a hobo.

When Albert Einstein was in residence at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, an eager young newspaper reporter approached him one day, notebook in hand. “Well, Professor Einstein,” he asked, “what's new in science?” Einstein looked at him with his deep, soft eyes and replied, “Oh? Have you already written about all the old science?

Testament Can Teach Us. San Francisco: HarperOne, 2011. Kugel, James L. How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now. New York: Free Press, 2008. *———. Traditions of the Bible: A Guide to the Bible as It Was at the Start of the Common Era. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. Levenson, Jon D. Creation and the Persistence of Evil: The Jewish Drama of Divine Omnipotence. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994. ———. The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son: The Transformation of Child Sacrifice in Judaism and Christianity. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995. ———. Sinai and Zion: An Entry into the Jewish Bible. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1987. Levine, Amy-Jill, and Marc Zvi Brettler. The Jewish Annotated New Testament. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. *Miller, J. M., and J. H. Hayes. A History of Ancient Israel and Judah. Second edition. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2006. *Moore, Megan Bishop, and Brad E. Kell. Biblical History and Israel’s Past: The Changing Study of the Bible and

Woodrow Wilson, then president of Princeton University, said the following to the New York City School Teachers Association in 1909: “We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forgo the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.

PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY The Old North bell tolls the hour, and I realize that I’ll be late. I long to break into a sprint, my voluminous skirts lifted, my legs flying along the Princeton University pathways. But just as I gather the heavy material, I hear Mama’s voice: Belle, be a lady at all times. I sigh; a lady would never run

Transactional Psychology, based largely on the pioneering research concerning human perception conducted at Princeton University in the 1940s by Albert Ames, agrees with all the above systems that we cannot know any abstract "Truth" but only relative truths (small t, plural) derived from our gambles as our brain makes models of the ocean of new signals it receives every second.

Princeton University mathematician York Dobyns found that the seven years of new PEAR RNG results closely replicated the preceding three decades of RNG studies reviewed in the meta-analysis.37 That is, our 1989 prediction had been validated. Because the massive PEAR database provides an exceptionally strong confirmation that mind-matter interactions really do exist, we can confidently use it to study some of the factors influencing these effects. Psychologist Roger Nelson and his colleagues found that the main RNG effect for the full PEAR database of 1,262 independent experiments, generated by 108 people, was associated with odds against chance of four thou sand to one.38 He also found that there were no “star” performers—this means that the overall effect reflected an accumulation of small effects from each person rather than a few outstanding results from “special people.” This finding confirms the expectation that mind-matter interaction effects observed in the hundreds of studies collected in the 1989 RNG meta-analysis were part of a widespread ability distributed throughout the population, and were not due to a few psychic “superstars” or a few odd experiments. Further analysis of the PEAR data showed that the results in individual trials were best interpreted as small changes in the probabilities of individual random events rather than as a few instances of wildly large effects. This means that the results cannot be explained by unexpected glitches in the RNG devices, or by strange circumstances in the lab (like a circuit breakdown). Rather, the effects were small but consistent across individual trials, and across different people.39 If we accept that one person can affect the behavior of an RNG, another question naturally arises: would two people together produce a larger effect? The PEAR database included some experiments where cooperating pairs used the same mental intention on the same RNG. Analysis of these data found that, on average, the effects were indeed larger for pairs than for individuals working alone. However, two people didn’t automatically get results that were twice as large as one person’s results. Instead, the composition of the pairs was important in determining the outcome. Same-sex pairs, whether men or women, tended to achieve null or slightly negative outcomes, whereas opposite-sex pairs produced an effect that was approximately twice that of individuals. Moreover, when the pair was a “bonded” couple, such as spouses or close family members, the effect size was more than four times that of individuals.

Princeton University mathematician York Dobyns found that the seven years of new PEAR RNG results closely replicated the preceding three decades of RNG studies reviewed in the meta-analysis.37 That is, our 1989 prediction had been validated. Because the massive PEAR database provides an exceptionally strong confirmation that mind-matter interactions really do exist, we can confidently use it to study some of the factors influencing these effects. Psychologist Roger Nelson and his colleagues found that the main RNG effect for the full PEAR database of 1,262 independent experiments, generated by 108 people, was associated with odds against chance of four thou sand to one.38 He also found that there were no “star” performers—this means that the overall effect reflected an accumulation of small effects from each person rather than a few outstanding results from “special people.” This finding confirms the expectation that mind-matter interaction effects observed in the hundreds of studies collected in the 1989 RNG meta-analysis were part of a widespread ability distributed throughout the population, and were not due to a few psychic “superstars” or a few odd experiments. Further analysis of the PEAR data showed that the results in individual trials were best interpreted as small changes in the probabilities of individual random events rather than as a few instances of wildly large effects. This means that the results cannot be explained by unexpected glitches in the RNG devices, or by strange circumstances in the lab (like a circuit breakdown). Rather, the effects were small but consistent across individual trials, and across different people.39 If we accept that one person can affect the behavior of an RNG, another question naturally arises: would two people together produce a larger effect? The PEAR database included some experiments where cooperating pairs used the same mental intention on the same RNG. Analysis of these data found that, on average, the effects were indeed larger for pairs than for individuals working alone. However, two people didn’t automatically get results that were twice as large as one person’s results. Instead, the composition of the pairs was important in determining the outcome. Same-sex pairs, whether men or women, tended to achieve null or slightly negative outcomes, whereas opposite-sex pairs produced an effect that was approximately twice that of individuals. Moreover, when the pair was a “bonded” couple, such as spouses or close family members, the effect size was more than four times that of individuals. There were also some gender differences. PEAR lab psychologist Brenda Dunne found that women tended to volunteer more time to the experiments, and thus they accumulated about two-thirds of the full database, compared with one-third for men. On the other hand, their effects were smaller on average than those of men, with odds of the difference being due to chance at eight hundred to one.

In 1956, at the age of three, I was walking home with my father, physicist Freeman Dyson, from his office at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, when I found a broken fan belt lying in the road. I asked my father what it was. “It’s a piece of the sun,” he said.

I prefer it by moonlight – George Seferis, tr. by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, from “In the Kyrenia District,” The Collected Poems 1924-1955 (‎ Princeton University Press; 1st edition, January 1, 1971)

As the sign over Albert Einstein's office at Princeton University read, “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.

Which it literally could be. Many of history’s greatest thinkers, leaders, scientists, artists, and entrepreneurs found some of their greatest inspiration going for walks. Beethoven used to take walks carrying blank pages of sheet music and a pencil. The Romantic poet William Wordsworth used to write as he took walks around a lake where he lived. Ancient Greek philosophers like Aristotle would lecture their students while taking long walks with them, often working out their ideas at the same time. Two thousand years later, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche would say, “It is only ideas gained from walking that have any worth.” Einstein refined many of his theories about the universe while walking around the Princeton University campus. The writer Henry David Thoreau would say, “The moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow.

Suddenly the sky collapsed into darkness and a dozen bright stars appeared. In their midst hung an awful, black ball, rimmed in ruby red and surrounded by the doomsday glow of the gray corona. No photograph can do justice to this appalling sight: The dynamic range from bright to dark is too great, and the colors are literally unearthly. (The ionized gas of the solar corona is hotter than anything gets on Earth except, momentarily, in the detonation of a hydrogen bomb, and is thinner than a laboratory vacuum.) I staggered back a few steps, like a drunken man—or like the Medes and Lydians, who stopped fighting and made peace when a solar eclipse interrupted their battle in 585 B.C. Observers more disciplined than myself have taken leave of their senses at just this moment. The astronomer Charles A. Young of Princeton University berated himself for falling into a trance during the 1869 solar eclipse in Iowa and failing to carry out his scientific tasks: “I cannot describe the sensation of surprise and mortification, of personal imbecility and wasted opportunity that overwhelmed me when the sunlight flashed out,” he recalled.

his view of the Princeton population took on a dark edge. “The values of the secular elite university are so radically anti-Christian,” he warned. “They are the harbingers of the culture of death. They create the culture of death. This is where the seeds are planted. You can see what is coming down the line by just looking at the atmosphere there now: hedonistic, naturalistic, secularistic.

All of these jobs required an education and therefore excluded women, who were not allowed into many universities. Although the University of London admitted women from 1877, it was nearly 70 years later in 1946 that the University of Cambridge did the same. In France, the Sorbonne admitted women in 1880 but two other Grandes Ecoles only started to accept women in the 1960s? It was only in the 1960s that Harvard University, Princeton University and New York University allowed women to be granted PhDs. Opportunities for women in the professions were therefore limited or non-existent. But there were jobs to be had in the unskilled work produced by Taylorism, with women replacing men in many countries in Europe and North America because they were cheaper to employ.

Harvard was started as an institution to train up Christian ministers. Matter of fact, their motto was Veritas Christo et Ecclesiae, which means ‘Truth for Christ and the Church.’ Yale University was started when ten ministers thought Harvard had become too liberal, so they started their own college! Students who attended Yale were required to ‘live religious, godly and blameless lives according to the rules of God’s Word, diligently reading the Holy Scriptures, the fountain of light and truth; and constantly attend upon all the duties of religion, both in public and secret.’ They were also instructed to ‘… consider the main end of his study to wit to know God in Jesus Christ’ and ‘to lead a Godly, sober life.’ Princeton University was founded by seven ministers after the Great Awakening to train ministers and offer other fields of study, as well.

Sweets, again, are a special case, which probably won’t be a surprise to anyone with a sweet tooth (or anyone who’s ever raised a child). First, the unique metabolic effects of fructose in the liver, combined with the insulin-stimulating effect of glucose, might be enough to induce cravings in those predisposed to fatten. But then there’s the effect in the brain: when you eat sugar, according to research by Bartley Hoebel of Princeton University, it triggers a response in the same part of the brain—known as the “reward center”—that is targeted by cocaine, alcohol, nicotine, and other addictive substances. All food does this to some extent, because that’s what the reward system apparently evolved to do: reinforce behaviors (eating and sex) that benefit the species. But sugar seems to hijack the signal to an unnatural degree, just as cocaine and nicotine do. If we believe the animal research, then sugar and high-fructose corn syrup are addictive in the same way that drugs are and for much the same biochemical reasons.* Now, how’s that for a vicious cycle? The foods that make us fat also make us crave precisely the foods that make us fat. (This,

Steven Toulmin's very insightful analysis and critique of Kuhn is found in his outstanding analysis of conceptual change Human Understanding: The Collective Use and Evaluation of Human Concepts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972).

Steven Toulmin's very insightful analysis and critique of Kuhn is found in his outstanding analysis of conceptual change Human Understanding: The Collective Use and Evaluation of Human Concepts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972

Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979; reprinted with new postscript and index in 1986).

Stuart M. Sperry. Keats the Poet. Princeton University Press; Princeton, NJ, 1993,

Bill Bradley (b. 1943) fell in love with the sport of basketball somewhere around the age of ten. He had one advantage over his peers—he was tall for his age. But beyond that, he had no real natural gift for the game. He was slow and gawky, and could not jump very high. None of the aspects of the game came easily to him. He would have to compensate for all of his inadequacies through sheer practice. And so he proceeded to devise one of the most rigorous and efficient training routines in the history of sports. Managing to get his hands on the keys to the high school gym, he created for himself a schedule—three and a half hours of practice after school and on Sundays, eight hours every Saturday, and three hours a day during the summer. Over the years, he would keep rigidly to this schedule. In the gym, he would put ten-pound weights in his shoes to strengthen his legs and give him more spring to his jump. His greatest weaknesses, he decided, were his dribbling and his overall slowness. He would have to work on these and also transform himself into a superior passer to make up for his lack of speed. For this purpose, he devised various exercises. He wore eyeglass frames with pieces of cardboard taped to the bottom, so he could not see the basketball while he practiced dribbling. This would train him to always look around him rather than at the ball—a key skill in passing. He set up chairs on the court to act as opponents. He would dribble around them, back and forth, for hours, until he could glide past them, quickly changing direction. He spent hours at both of these exercises, well past any feelings of boredom or pain. Walking down the main street of his hometown in Missouri, he would keep his eyes focused straight ahead and try to notice the goods in the store windows, on either side, without turning his head. He worked on this endlessly, developing his peripheral vision so he could see more of the court. In his room at home, he practiced pivot moves and fakes well into the night—such skills that would also help him compensate for his lack of speed. Bradley put all of his creative energy into coming up with novel and effective ways of practicing. One time his family traveled to Europe via transatlantic ship. Finally, they thought, he would give his training regimen a break—there was really no place to practice on board. But below deck and running the length of the ship were two corridors, 900 feet long and quite narrow—just enough room for two passengers. This was the perfect location to practice dribbling at top speed while maintaining perfect ball control. To make it even harder, he decided to wear special eyeglasses that narrowed his vision. For hours every day he dribbled up one side and down the other, until the voyage was done. Working this way over the years, Bradley slowly transformed himself into one of the biggest stars in basketball—first as an All-American at Princeton University and then as a professional with the New York Knicks. Fans were in awe of his ability to make the most astounding passes, as if he had eyes on the back and sides of his head—not to mention his dribbling prowess, his incredible arsenal of fakes and pivots, and his complete gracefulness on the court. Little did they know that such apparent ease was the result of so many hours of intense practice over so many years.

From New York Harbor to Grand Central Station, then onto a train to a place called Princeton Junction. Once there, Simone and her father had been shuttled to a single railcar that traveled on a short spur line, no more than a mile or two long, which terminated at the foot of the university campus.

Alexander Bird's Thomas Kuhn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000