General Relativity

Thirty years ago, Martin Rees, a former Member in the School of Natural Sciences and current IAS Trustee, predicted that bright flares produced when a star is torn apart by a black hole—what astrophysicists now call tidal disruption events (TDEs)...

Nima Arkani-Hamed, Professor in the School of Natural Sciences, delivered the public lecture “The End of Spacetime” at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, CA, on June 19.

Watch Arkani-Hamed discuss the union of quantum mechanics and...

Recent findings on traversable wormholes by physicists including former Members Daniel Jafferis and Aron Wall inspired by the ER = EPR conjecture posed by Juan Maldacena, Carl P. Feinberg Professor in the School of Natural Sciences, and Leonard...

The conflict between the two halves of physics has been brewing for more than a century—sparked by a pair of 1905 papers by Einstein, one outlining relativity and the other introducing the quantum—but recently it has entered an intriguing...

What struck me was some regularity in the anomaly. The rotational velocities were not just larger than expected, they became constant with radius. Why? Sure, if there was dark matter, the speed of stars would be greater, but the rotation curves...

Einstein was a true genius and it’s the example that we all aspire to be as a scientist. But already as a child he had a very original way of thinking. So from the very beginning, for Einstein, his imagination was crucial.

View the video at Business...

Perhaps the most fundamental philosophical question that you can ask in science is: "Why are we here?"

To understand the universe, we have to bring together the two key ideas that are governing modern physics. On the one hand, we have Einstein’s...

Einstein’s general theory of relativity taught us that the universe is expanding, but we have only recently discovered the pace of that expansion and its consequences. View the video at Business Insider as Robbert Dijkgraaf, Institute Director and...

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project, a multinational effort involving more than 100 researchers, including School of Natural Sciences Members Dimitrios Psaltis (2001–03), Feryal Özel (2002–05), and Ramesh Narayan (1987–88, 1994, 2001 and...