Natural Sciences

"The idea, put forth by Juan Maldacena of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., hinted at something profound: that our universe could be a hologram. Much like a 3-D hologram emerges from the information encoded on a 2-D surface, our universe’s 4-D spacetime could be a holographic projection of a lower-dimensional reality."

"Physicists have purportedly created the first-ever wormhole, a kind of tunnel theorized in 1935 by Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen that leads from one place to another by passing into an extra dimension of space."

Didier Fassin, James D. Wolfensohn Professor in the School of Social Science, has been elected to the American Philosophical Society (APS), which recognizes extraordinary accomplishments across a variety of fields. 

"The gas gobbled up by M87* and Sgr A* (the supermassive black holes at the centers of Messier 87 and the Milky Way), is likely a mix of hydrogen and helium with just a dash of heavier elements, but we don’t know its exact composition."

The Institute for Advanced Study extends well wishes to former Mathematics/Natural Sciences Faculty member Chen Ning Yang on his 100th birthday. During Yang’s time at IAS, he and his collaborator, fellow Faculty member Tsung Dao Lee, were awarded the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics. He has a left tremendous legacy in our community today.

"Widely separated binary systems take more than a thousand years to complete a single orbit, making it challenging to measure the eccentricity of an individual system. Instead, Hsiang-Chih Hwang used a statistical technique to study nearly a million binary systems at once."

"The Arts and Sciences used to share much of the same intellectual space. Only recently have they diverged to the degree that they seem diametrically opposed. The Exchange is our attempt to rekindle some of the dialogue that occurred between the two fields."

Research from IAS scholars, past and present, features prominently in the September 2022 issue of Scientific American. Past Director’s Visitor George Musser takes account of the recent groundbreaking work being done on the infamous black hole information paradox by researchers including Member Ahmed Almheiri, who authors his own essay on the solution to the paradox.