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...
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...
On November 12, at the opening of the Large Hadron Collider
exhibition at the Science Museum in London, Nima Arkani-Hamed, Professor in
the School of Natural Sciences, met with novelist Ian McEwan for a conversation aimed at
finding the common...
Following the discovery in July of a Higgs-like boson—an effort
that took more than fifty years of experimental work and more than
10,000 scientists and engineers working on the Large Hadron
Collider—Juan Maldacena and Nima Arkani-Hamed, two...
“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.”
Before dawn on July 4, CERN scientists announced the discovery
of a new particle consistent with the boson predicted nearly fifty
years ago by Peter Higgs. He gave one of his first seminars on his
theory at the Institute at the invitation of...
The stability of the solar system is one of the oldest problems
in theoretical physics, dating back to Isaac Newton. After Newton
discovered his famous laws of motion and gravity, he used these to
determine the motion of a single planet around the...
I arrived at the Institute for Advanced Study in October 2003, after spending two years as a fellow at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, in Geneva, Switzerland. For any theoretical physicist the Institute is a mythical place, and the offer to become a Member presented the possibility of a life-changing experience.
Physicists have used Feynman diagrams as a tool for calculating
scattering amplitudes that describe particle interactions for more
than six decades. Their broad utility was due initially in large
part to the seminal work of Freeman Dyson, Professor...
One of the remarkable discoveries in astrophysics has been the
recognition that the material we see and are familiar with, which
makes up the earth, the sun, the stars, and everyday objects, such
as a table, is only a small fraction of all of the...
