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Prospects in Theoretical Physics

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Press Release

Prospects in Theoretical Physics 2018: From Qubits to Spacetime

July 13, 2018
“It is an interesting time to explore the deep connections between quantum information theory, quantum field theory, and the structure of spacetime,” said Professor Juan Maldacena, welcoming 166 graduate students and postdoctoral scholars from 76 institutions, representing 21 countries, to PiTP 2018.

Ideas

Founders’ Statement on America and Higher Learning

“We feel strongly that the spirit characteristic of America at its noblest, above all the pursuit of higher learning, cannot admit of any conditions as to personnel other than those designed to promote the objects for which this institution is established, and particularly with no regard whatever to accidents of race, creed, or sex.”

IAS News

Member Cynthia Hahn Named Fellow of the Medieval Academy

July 18, 2018
Cynthia Hahn, Member in the School of Historical Studies, is among the five new Fellows and Corresponding Fellows selected by the Medieval Academy of America for their notable contributions to the field of Medieval Studies.

Ideas

The Power of Mirror Symmetry

By Robbert Dijkgraaf

A striking example of the magic of quantum theory is mirror symmetry—a truly astonishing equivalence of spaces that has revolutionized geometry.

In the Media

Rootless Cosmopolitans

July 11, 2018
“What people call themselves speaks to us memorably about their traditions, their aspirations, and their hopes. But it may not tell us anything at all about their history,” writes Glen W. Bowersock, Professor Emeritus in the School of Historical Studies, in the New York Review of Books.

Ideas

Relics and Related Devotional Objects

By Caroline Walker Bynum

Over the past hundred years, historians of religion have been particularly interested in a subset of devotional objects that have been designated by worshippers with a word that can be translated as “relics” or “remains”: holy bodies or parts of bodies, or physical objects that have been in contact with them or their burial sites.

Ideas

Charting One’s Course Through Mirror Symmetry

By Paul Seidel

When going about the mind-bending business of revisiting our concept of space, how can the imagination keep a foothold? 

Ideas

How Topology Detects Certain Phases of Matter

By Daniel Freed

The techniques developed over many years by topologists—generalized cohomology theories, the Adams spectral sequence, and much more—are now brought to bear on specific computations of interest in physics.

Faculty and Members

The idea is that by thinking about black holes we will understand how quantum spacetime works.

Juan Maldacena in The Cool Alter-Ego of a Black Hole

In the realm of politics, the value of freedom is collective and enabling. It makes it possible for men and women to join together and claim equal standing. Take political freedom away and equality becomes a lost project.

Michael Walzer on Freedom and Equality

Gene regulatory networks are the source of many human diseases. How do we infer network structure from partial data? What is the network most likely to have produced
the little bit that we can see?

Jennifer Chayes in The Age of Networks

Why did polymath Joris Hoefnagel, in the midst of the Dutch Revolt, produce an illustrated volume of hundreds of insects? 

Marisa Anne Bass in Insect Artifice