Natural Sciences

"The Institute for Advanced Study doesn’t have any students or classes. There’s no regular daily agenda full of meetings and conferences. The scholars here don’t even have to research any specific topic. They could spend their whole day walking the grounds or sitting by the lake."

"It is sometimes called 'a scholar’s paradise' – the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton recently welcomed its latest group of 200 top-of-their field scholars from around the world. But despite all of the academics, one of the Institute’s most cherished and longstanding traditions is the 3 p.m. tea time. It is a chance for the members to mix and mingle and to bounce ideas off one another."

By Nima Arkani-Hamed, Professor in the School of Natural Sciences:

"Steven Weinberg, who died on July 23, towered over theoretical physics in the second half of the 20th century. He strongly believed that, armed only with the fundamental principles...

Roman Rafikov of the School of Natural Sciences, visiting from the University of Cambridge, with co-author Kedron Silsbee of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, has brought this Hollywood scene several steps closer to reality, producing the most realistic model to date of planet formation in binary star systems.

The Spektrum-Roentgen-Gamma (SRG) orbital X-ray observatory and its associated institutions and industrial partners received the 2021 Marcel Grossmann Institutional Award. The international collaboration is cited for the following achievements:

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"Nathan Seiberg, 64, still does a lot of the electrical work and even some of the plumbing around his house in Princeton, New Jersey. It’s an interest he developed as a kid growing up in Israel, where he tinkered with his car and built a radio.

'I...

The most accurate distance measurement yet of ultra-diffuse galaxy (UDG) NGC1052-DF2 (DF2) confirms beyond any shadow of a doubt that it is lacking in dark matter. The newly measured distance of 22.1 +/-1.2 megaparsecs was obtained by an international team of researchers led by Zili Shen and Pieter van Dokkum of Yale University and Shany Danieli, a NASA Hubble Fellow at the Institute.

IAS Director and Leon Levy Professor Robbert Dijkgraaf and Professor Nati Seiberg speak with Quanta Magazine about Quantum Field Theory and consider what a complete mathematical understanding could mean to physics.

The Gruber Foundation and International Astronomical Union (IAU) has announced that Matias Zaldarriaga, Richard Black Professor in the School of Natural Sciences, is a recipient of the 2021 Gruber Cosmology Prize. Zaldarriaga shares the honor with M...

"Sgr A*, the 4.6-million-solar-mass black hole that lies at the center of the Milky Way, is normally a fairly quiet beast. The black hole slowly feeds on accreting material in the galactic center — but this food source is sparse, and Sgr A*’s...