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...
Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, a pillar of
modern physics formulated 100 years ago, was celebrated by the
Institute for Advanced Study and Princeton University in a two-day
conference, General Relativity at 100. The conference...
Un-Biased Cosmology from Biased Tracers, a workshop held at the
Institute from September 24–26, 2012, explored the astrophysical
issues associated with simple bias models, which ignore crucial
clustering properties and can neither describe data nor...
Three years ago, just before it was scheduled to shut down in
preparation for its second phase, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)
discovered the Higgs boson. Its discovery was expected, having been
predicted nearly sixty years earlier by Peter Higgs...
Addressing an international audience in 2004, Professor Dong
Guangbi, an erudite historian of science, summarized Chinese
physics development over the previous century, and he argued that
the country from which Chinese physicists and physics...
What do the motion of the planets in our solar system, the
energy levels of the hydrogen atom, and the interactions between
subatomic particles have in common? Surprisingly, they are all
governed by the same hidden symmetry principles. This is
what...
In 2006, Edward Witten, Charles Simonyi Professor in the School
of Natural Sciences, cowrote with Anton Kapustin a 225-page paper,
“Electric-Magnetic Duality and the Geometric Langlands Program,” on
the relation of part of the geometric Langlands...
The image taken of the total solar eclipse of May 29, 1919, was
among Albert Einstein’s
possessions when he died in 1955, then Professor Emeritus in the
School of Mathematics. The image, taken by astronomer Arthur
Eddington and now in the collection...
Prospects in Theoretical Physics is summer program designed for
graduate students and postdoctoral scholars considering a career in
theoretical physics. First held by the School of Natural Sciences
at the Institute for Advanced Study in the summer...
“It’s not obvious where this is going. Maybe it will be
something spectacular. Maybe it will just be a curiosity. We don’t
know. But it’s something. And it’s a beautiful something.”—Nima Arkani-Hamed
