Black holes are among the strangest predictions of Einstein’s
general theory of relativity: regions of spacetime in which gravity
is so strong that nothing—not even light—can escape. More
precisely, a black hole is a singularity in spacetime...
Christmas Day, 1942, was the three hundredth birthday of Isaac
Newton. I was then an undergraduate at Trinity College, Cambridge.
Since Newton was our most famous fellow, the college organized a
meeting to celebrate his birthday. Since it was war...
Mikhail Gorbachev defied every expectation at home and abroad by
permitting the Berlin Wall to be breached in November 1989. He had
finally allowed the imbalance of military power in Europe, which
had stood provocatively and overwhelmingly to Soviet...
The article by Wally Greenberg in the spring 2015 Institute
Letter mentions the anomalous axial current triangle diagram
and describes its connection with counting quark degrees of
freedom. This derives from a calculation I did when a
long-term...
Does beauty exist in mathematics? The question concerns
mathematical objects and their relations, the real subject of
verifiable proofs. Mathematicians generally agree that beauty does
exist in the structural beauty of theorems and proofs, even
if...
The Macdonald Equation is the most beautiful thing that I ever
discovered. It belongs to the theory of numbers, the most useless
and ancient branch of mathematics. My friend Ian Macdonald had the
joy of discovering it first, and I had the almost...
We should not assume that making sense of post-Soviet Russia was
ever going to be easy. Great Powers that lose empires bear grudges
and the speed with which an empire is lost can exacerbate the
problem. No one can expect that a powerful country run...
