Edward Witten

“The most spectacular element of the Penrose calculations is that he showed that if you are close enough to a black hole, time ends. It is the mirror image of the Big Bang.”

—Robbert Dijkgraaf, IAS Director and Leon Levy Professor (Wall Street...

Edward Witten, Charles Simonyi Professor in the School of Natural Sciences, has been elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Other elected scholars include Shirley M. Tilghman, IAS Trustee; William Nielsen Brandt...

Daniel Freedman, former Member (1967–68, 73–74, 86–87) in the School of Natural Sciences, along with collaborators Sergio Ferrara and Peter van Nieuwenhuizen were announced today as the recipients of the 2019 Special Breakthrough Prize in...

Writing for Quanta Magazine, previous Director's Visitor K.C. Cole presents a historical overview of the idea of symmetry, highlighting the research of Albert Einstein, Emmy Noether, Carl P. Feinberg Professor Juan Maldacena, and Charles Simonyi...

Approximately 166 graduate students and postdoctoral scholars from 76 different institutions, representing 21 countries, will participate in “From Qubits to Spacetime,” the theme of Prospects in Theoretical Physics (PiTP) 2018, an intensive two-week...

The Strings 2018 conference, which convened international experts and researchers to discuss string theory, took place from June 25–29, 2018, in Okinawa, Japan. The annual international Strings conferences, which have been held every year since 1995...

“Trying to understand Hawking’s discovery better has been a source of much fresh thinking for almost 40 years now, and we are probably still far from fully coming to grips with it. It still feels new,” said Edward Witten, Charles Simonyi Professor...

“It’s not easy being a 'theory of everything.' A TOE has the very tough job of fitting gravity into the quantum laws of nature in such a way that, on large scales, gravity looks like curves in the fabric of space-time, as Albert Einstein described...

“When you have dualities, things that are easy to see in one description can be hard to see in the other description. So you and I, for example, are fairly simple to describe in the usual approach to physics as developed by Newton and his successors...

In the past decade, physicists have found that topology provides unique insight into the physics of materials, such as how some insulators can sneakily conduct electricity along a single-atom layer on their surfaces.

Some of these topological effects...