Natural Sciences

Could dark matter consist of primordial black holes, as numerous as the stars? It’s an old, improbable idea, but it made a Lazarus-like comeback a year ago, when the discovery of gravitational waves suggested that the cosmos abounds with...

In the last 65 years of biology, we have witnessed three changes in the dominant paradigm employed to make progress in the life sciences; the systems biology of organisms (300 BC to 1950 AD), molecular biology and genetics employing a reductionist...

The Institute for Advanced Study, since its founding in 1930, has aspired to provide an unbiased environment for international scholars to pursue vital and groundbreaking work in the sciences and humanities. Its mission is to recruit the world’s...

As part of the Ideas Roadshow series "Research Insights," Scott Tremaine, Richard Black Professor in the School of Natural Sciences, discusses astrophysical wonders, including comets, Pluto, planetary rings, shepherding satellites, exoplanets, chaos...

On April 14, 1954, Albert Einstein, one of the Institute's first Faculty members (1933–55), gave the last lecture of his life. Speaking to physics students at Princeton University, he remarked that although quantum mechanics works, “it is difficult...

Steven Weinberg discusses how the development of quantum mechanics in the first decades of the twentieth century came as a shock to many physicists. Today, despite the great successes of quantum mechanics, arguments continue about its meaning, and...

Welcome to the Universe (Princeton University Press, 2016) by Michael A. Strauss, Member in the School of Natural Sciences (1991–95), Neil deGrasse Tyson, and J. Richard Gott has been cited on the New York Times's Best Sellers in Science list....

One gets the sense that Freeman Dyson has seen everything. It’s not just that at 92 he’s had a front row seat on scientific breakthroughs for the past century, or that he’s been friends and colleagues with many of the giants of 20th-century physics...

Like many astrophysicists, Sara Seager sometimes has a problem with her perception of scale. Knowing that there are hundreds of billions of galaxies, and that each might contain hundreds of billions of stars, can make the lives of astrophysicists...

The biggest prize payday in science came around again Sunday evening when the Breakthrough Foundation handed out more than $25 million in its annual prizes to more than a thousand physicists, life scientists and mathematicians.

Jean Bourgain, IBM von...