Alexander Polyakov, left, a 67-year old physicist at Princeton University, is in the running for the $3 million Fundamental Physics Prize, donated by Russian entrepreneur Yuri Milner. Polyakov, who works with quantum field theory and string theory, used to live in Moscow and work at the Landau Institute. He is now the Joseph Henry Professor of Physics.

 (You remember Joseph Henry.  His yellow house sits on the front lawn of the university, and he contributed to the invention of the telegraph, the telephone, and the electric motor. He was also the first director of the Smithsonian Institution.)

Yuri Milner (photo from Crunch base)

Milner, 51, who by the way is a Wharton school graduate, made his $1 billion on such internet investments as Groupon and Facebook. Just announced: his investment in 23andme, the consumer genetics startup that Esther Dyson talked about three years ago at a chamber lunch,. Milner calls himself a failed physicist, according to today’s New York Times article, and this is the second year he has given out lots of prizes.

The winners will be announced on March 20, and since the previous winners select the next winners — if you are a physicist, it wouldn’t hurt to be extra nice to Professor Polyakov. Milner’s prize is more than double the Nobel Prize, and you don’t have to travel to Stockholm.

Architects are eminently practical. Most of them, anyway. Theirs is among the most useful of occupations. Writes Robert Geddes: “Architecture should embrace fitness — order and organization, growth and form. The ‘oath of architecture’ should be loud and clear: make it fit.”

Geddes, former dean of the Princeton University School of Architecture, has a new book Fit: an Architect’s Manifesto, published by Princeton University Press.  In Rich Rein’s column in the current issue of U.S. 1 Newspaper, Rein lists some of Geddes’ eminent projects and also notes that he is a leader of Princeton Future, “the farsighted group that calls attention to planning issues that otherwise only come into view when they reach the planning board for a yes or no vote.”

Geddes will speak and sign his book at Labyrinth Books, 122 Nassau Street, on Monday, December 10, at 6 p.m. 609-497-1600. That’s the same night that the Princeton Township Planning Board will continue its hearings on the controversial AvalonBay development of the former medical center building.

Geddes wrote that buildings should be “our shared, functional, and expressive places.” I can guess what he thinks of the AvalonBay plan.

Also in the news is how another prominent architect, J. Robert Hillier,  is recycling giant boulders to help shore up the New Jersey shore. While excavating for his age-restricted development on Bunn Drive, Bob Hillier’s contractors unearthed 400 tons of glacial rock. It is being put to great use to build jetties in Deal, Bay Head, and Mantoloking.

Finding the rock was a surprise. There isn’t a good way to predict whether you are digging into it. I discovered that when the well digger came to dig 300 feet down for my geothermal heating and cooling system.

But urban planning — town planning in a community of Princeton’s size — need not involve surprises. We need to take a leaf from the architects’ books and, not just “THINK” but “THINK AHEAD.”

When it comes to fundraising, Christians in the 4th century may have something to teach the churches and charities of today. At least that’s one thing I got out of the conversation between Peter Brown and Elaine Pagels at Labyrinth Bookstore on Wednesday night. Brown and Pagels talked about his new very thick book Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, published by Princeton University Press. The room was packed with Brown’s many avid admirers, a group to which I now eagerly belong.

Brown is the acknowledged expert on late antiquity,  the period from the 2nd to the 8th centuries, when the Christian church was on the rise and the aristocracy of Rome was in decline.

Telling of how the church acquired its wealth, Brown said that — in contrast to secular Rome’s rich upper class, which felt an obligation to give gifts for the public good — the big givers of the Christian church were not necessarily the wealthy. “To hold together such a socially differentiated group of givers was one of the great achievements of the Christian churches of the time.,” writes Brown. “It was based on creative synergy between new wealth and a low profile religious group that had already been schooled to engage in collective ventures.”

 “The unspoken heroes are the average Joes,” said Brown. Their names weren’t on monuments, like the rich Romans. They were on tombstones and in graffiti. They had a willingness to give big.”

Apparently some things in the church never change. If you know anything about big money fundraising, you have heard of the 80-20 rule, that 80 percent of the funds raised will be donated by 20 percent of the people involved. That’s why, when you start to raise big money, you go to the likely big donors first, to get a head start.

Guess what — this has been true for 17 centuries, says Brown.

Thanks to Francisco Marshall’s blog for the terrific photograph of Peter Brown. 

. P. 87. 

“Members of the rich often came to the church so as to find there a social urban lung. They valued in the churches a certain lowering of the sense of hierarchy and a slowing down of the pace of competition.”

 The sense that the glory of heaven stood behind their every gift enabled the Christian rich to contribute regularly and with that much less strain. By giving in the Christian churches they took part in a communal religious venture tinged with expectation of limitless rewards.

Peter Brown spoke at Labyrinth Bookstore

Diversity is much prized by some Christian congregations, but in recent history it hasn’t always been this way. Churches have been historically the most segregated, divisive groups in America. But in Rome in the period of late antiquity, in the period from the 2nd to the 8th centuries, says Peter Brown, the church promoted the value of diversity.

In a conversation between Brown and Elaine Pagels at Labyrinth Bookstore on Wednesday night. Brown and Pagels discussed Brown’s new Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, published by Princeton University Press. Brown cautioned against “pauperizing” the poor, thinking of poor people as … simply … poor.

Quickly scanning his book, I found Brown’s observation that, in the Hebrew tradition, the poor were not merely beggars: They came to the rich and religious leaders to seek justice and protection. Brown writes (page 77) that the early Christian church viewed the poor, not as ‘the others” but as “our brothers.” (Ironically that is even more true today now that folks who thought they could live in comfort now find themselves in foreclosures. In Princeton there are hidden pockets of need in the most affluent-seeming homes.)

Brown writes (page 87) that wealthy people “valued in the churches a certain lowering of the sense of hierarchy and a slowing down of the pace of competition.” (Just two days before, this is what Roberto Schiraldi seemed to be calling for, when he led a Not in Our Town discussion on the values of “white privilege” at the Princeton Public Library.)

Continues Brown, “Members of the rich often came to the church so as to find there a social urban lung.” That term, social urban lung, describes a place like the Princeton Public Library, which harbored refugees from the power outtage, some poor, some wealthy, all equal as they needed warmth and plug-ins. It also describes the house of worship where people can drop their pretensions or inadequacies and “love their neighbor as themselves.’

It  has resonance to see what I see happening in my own church, where at the very hour Peter Brown was speaking, the Cornerstone Community Kitchen was serving dinner to a wide variety of people — some who needed the food, some who just wanted to mingle, some who just wanted to “give back” by helping. The good part is, you don’t need to know — and it isn’t obvious  — to which group a person belongs.

P.S. Come out some Wednesday for the free meal, served in partnership with the Trenton Area Soup Kitchen but definitely not in a soup kitchen atmosphere. You are served by volunteers at an elegantly dressed table (at right), and the meal includes fresh vegetables, salad, and dessert, and there’s even a piano player. It’s every Wednesday, 5 to 6:30, at the Methodist church at the corner of Nassau and Vandeventer, all welcome.

I love Brown’s term, “a social urban lung.”