Juan Maldacena

In an opinion piece for The Washington Post, Brian Greene, Member (1992–93) in the Schools of Mathematics and Natural Sciences, argues that scholars should continue exploring string theory, even in the absence of experimental verification.

In August, 157 participants from 10 countries gathered at the Institute for the initial focus weeks of a workshop on Quantum Information and Physics. The workshop, which will continue through October 31, 2024, considers the relation of quantum complexity to physical systems such as many-body problems in quantum simulators, condensed matter physics, quantum field theory, and quantum gravity.

Past scholars in the Schools of Mathematics and Natural Sciences are among the recipients of the 2024 Sloan Research Fellowships, a landmark honor for early-career scholars. 

This December, over 200 scholars from across the globe descended on the Institute for Advanced Study for a three-day Qubit workshop focused on applying ideas and concepts from quantum information theory to the study of spacetime.

All four of this year’s winners of the Dirac Medal––Jeffrey Harvey, Igor Klebanov, Stephen Shenker, and Leonard Susskind––are past Members in the School of Natural Sciences.

"The idea, put forth by Juan Maldacena of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., hinted at something profound: that our universe could be a hologram. Much like a 3-D hologram emerges from the information encoded on a 2-D surface, our universe’s 4-D spacetime could be a holographic projection of a lower-dimensional reality."

"Physicists have purportedly created the first-ever wormhole, a kind of tunnel theorized in 1935 by Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen that leads from one place to another by passing into an extra dimension of space."