IT is not hard to speculate on what Albert Einstein and J. Robert Oppenheimer talked about when they bumped into each other in the hallways, meeting rooms and cafeteria of the Princeton-based Institute of Advanced Study (IAS) in the 1950s. Einstein was then a member of the IAS faculty, which was under the direction of Oppenheimer. Their shared passion was quantum physics, and the IAS at the time hosted the planet's most gifted collection of physicists and mathematicians. Einstein and Oppenheimer were the stars of that New Jersey constellation of geniuses. One topic they probably avoided — their Jewishness. The anti-Jewish hysteria had yet to die down in the US and Europe in the 1950s, despite the Nazis' crushing defeat in World War 2.

What was one factor that led to the defeat of the Axis powers in the war? A passion for education that included scientific quests and the belief that the pursuit of education was without boundaries and without collaterals. A passion for testing, experimentation, and testing and experimentation without boundaries. An inquisitive mind that said quantum physics was not to stop at sophisticated theorems but had to be harnessed fully to its logical ends.