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Ideas

Einstein’s Eclipse

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 of the Institute’s Shelby White and Leon Levy Archives Center, provided striking evidence of Einstein’s general theory of relativity because of the way starlight was shown to curve around the mass of the Sun. 

IAS News

IAS Statement on Revised Executive Order

March 07, 2017
As an institution, we oppose the revised travel ban on the principles of justice and non-discrimination and stand in unison for the advancement of knowledge without borders and prejudice.

Ideas

Curiosities: Light’s Revelations and Mysteries

By Robbert Dijkgraaf

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 after many, many billions of years formed human life on planet Earth, and we use light to observe and understand the universe. 

In the Media

Eclipse Hunter Reveals the Science That Can Only Be Done in the Dark

August 10, 2017
Jay Pasachoff, former Member in the School of Natural Sciences, has seen 33 total solar eclipses, and another 32 if you count partial eclipses and annular eclipses.

Ideas

Videos from Prospects in Theoretical Physics 2017

Watch videos from PiTP 2017, titled “Particle Physics at the LHC and Beyond,” which took place at the Institute in July. Talks range from experimental results in particle physics to prospects for physics beyond the standard model.

Faculty and Members

An academic Eden where you could do mathematics, uninterrupted by worries about money or sour cream. Was that even real?

Olga Holtz in My Random Walks with Pólya and Szegő

Why does the equation that describes the average motion of water molecules also govern the ripples of spacetime?

Shiraz Minwalla in From Fluid Dynamics to Gravity and Back

What is a state? We propose our own response as sociologists and anthropologists. But the specificity of our approach resides in its method: ethnography.

Didier Fassin in What Is a State?

[Ettela`] had started a conversation within Iran about what constituted a newspaper culture.

Negin Nabavi in The Birth of Newspaper Culture in Nineteenth-Century Iran