Natural Sciences

In this lecture, Max Tegmark surveys how humans have repeatedly underestimated not only the size of the cosmos, but also the power of the human mind to understand it using mathematical equations. He explores how mathematics in physics has allowed us...

In 1913, Victor Hess measured the background level of atmospheric ionization while ascending with a balloon. By doing so, he discovered that Earth is continuously bathed in ionizing radiation. These cosmic rays primarily consist of protons and...

Many natural and social phenomena may be viewed as inherently computational; they evolve patterns of information that can be described algorithmically and studied through computational models and techniques. A workshop on the computational lens...

Light is the great unifier. John Wheeler, the beloved Princeton physicist, used to draw the universe as a big capital U with a little eye on one leg, signifying that we, human beings, are the eyes of the universe looking back at itself. The universe...

I gave a copy of the preprint of my paper to Robert Oppenheimer, who, as Director of the Institute for Advanced Study, was my host. A week later I met him at an Eastern Physics Meeting at the University of Maryland, my home institution. When I asked him if he had read my paper, he replied, “Greenberg, it’s beautiful!” I was elated. After a pause, he completed his assessment of my paper by saying, “But I don’t believe a word of it!”

The theoretical astrophysicist and Princeton University professor is well known for his work on NASA’s 2001 Microwave Anisotropy Probe—he conceptualized the mission and deciphered the radio telescope’s data to measure the age of the universe, the...

Jo Bovy, John N. Bahcall Fellow in the School of Natural Sciences, explores the stars, planets, and gases that make up galaxies, the dark matter that holds them together, and the history of our own Milky Way.

One of the biggest discoveries of humankind is yet to come: Finding compelling evidence for life on another planet. In this lecture, Hanno Rein, former Member (2010–13) in the School of Natural Sciences, discusses the many places to look for...

How did the universe begin? Robbert Dijkgraaf, Director and Leon Levy Professor, explains what we know about the Big Bang and explores the mysteries of our universe.

The Institute’s thirteenth annual Prospects in Theoretical Physics (PiTP) summer program for graduate students and postdoctoral scholars, which focused on string theory, was truly extraordinary in that it overlapped with Strings 2014. This is one of...