Pythagoras and Plato intuited that the world should embody
beautiful ideas; Newton and Maxwell demonstrated how the world
could embody beautiful ideas, in specific impressive cases.
Finally, in the twentieth...
“It is indeed an endless cycle of imagination and concentration, of divergence and convergence, of playing and thinking that determines the rhythm of science and scholarship,” writes Robbert Dijkgraaf on the occasion of becoming the Institute’s ninth Director and first Leon Levy Professor. “The Institute is devoted to creating and supporting these experiences.”
Quantum theory radically transforms our fundamental
understanding of physical reality. It reveals that the world
contains a hidden richness of structure that we have barely begun
to control and exploit. According to quantum theory, what we
perceive...
