The Institute for Advanced Study is one of the few institutions in the world where the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake is the ultimate raison d’être. Speculative research, the kind that is fundamental to the advancement of human understanding of the world of nature and of humanity, is not a product that can be made to order. Rather, like artistic creativity, it benefits from a special environment.
While practical benefits often result from pure academic research at the most fundamental level, such benefits are not guaranteed and cannot be predicted; nor need they be seen as the ultimate goal. Ventures into unknown territory inevitably involve an element of risk, and scientists and scholars are rarely motivated by the thought of an end product. Rather, they are moved by a creative curiosity that is the hallmark of academic inquiry.
Like a traditional university it was devoted to the promotion of learning, but its scale was smaller and it did not offer formal instruction. Nor did it have large laboratories. It was to be a place for the most highly specialised research, yet it provided an atmosphere open to intellectual exchange across all disciplinary boundaries.
There really isn’t anywhere like the Institute. Because of its very strong postdoctoral programs in astrophysics, physics, mathematics, and other disciplines, it has been a kind of funnel through which a large fraction of all of the most productive researchers in many of the physical sciences have passed.
My life was fashioned by the Institute. There is no question that my whole career would have been completely different if I had not had the remarkable opportunity of participating in a place that is so single-mindedly determined to let your own imagination flourish.
I am not unaware of the fact that I have sketched an educational Utopia. I have deliberately hitched the Institute to a star; it would be wrong to begin with any other ambition or aspiration.
There has been no other place in the world from which, scholar for scholar and square foot for square foot, more and finer scholarship has emerged over these past forty years than from these surrounding walls.
The Institute for Advanced Study has achieved a position that is unrivaled in the world of science and scholarship. In all fields where it has been engaged, its contributions have set the standards against which other contributions may be measured.