Ideas

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!”

Thomas Crow, Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art at New York University, examines the displaced and wandering existences of Jacques-Louis David and Théodore Géricault, both in geographical and psychological exile, during which each was forced to reexamine and reconfigure the fundamentals of his artistic life. 

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...

Mathematics has proven to be "unreasonably effective" in understanding nature. The fundamental laws of physics can be captured in beautiful formulae. In this lecture, given at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Robbert Dijkgraaf...

In his 1951 poem “Harlem,” Langston Hughes, writer and social activist, famously questioned the outcome of a “dream deferred.” Does such a dream dry up, fester, stink, crust and sugar over, or sag like a heavy load, he pondered. Then, foreshadowing the hundreds of race riots that would take place in the 1960s and 1970s, he ends his poem with an emphatic query: Or does it explode?

--

What is real about this ethnography—what hasn’t been altered or rendered anonymous—are the events that I describe and the voices of my collaborators. Their voices bring to life the activities that take place on Chicago’s street corners. Their voices bring dimension to people’s identities and life struggles. Their voices paint a portrait of the variegated desires that stem from imagining life anew.

Michael Walzer, Professor Emeritus in the School of Social Science, has authored The Paradox of Liberation: Secular Revolutions and Religious Counterrevolutions (Yale University Press), which asks the question "Why have secular democratic movements...

Johannes Krause, Professor of Archaeology and Paleogenetics at the University of Tübingen and Director of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, will discuss ancient human genomes and how they suggest three ancestral...

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.

Éditions du Seuil has published L'Ombre du monde. Une anthropologie de la condition carcérale (2015) by Didier Fassin, James D. Wolfensohn Professor in the School of Social Science. Fassin conducted a four-year-long ethnographic study of prison life...

What do quantum interference, flocking of birds, Facebook communities, and stock prices have in common?

Many natural and social phenomena may be viewed as inherently computational; they evolve patterns of information that can be described...