Juan Maldacena

Research from IAS scholars, past and present, features prominently in the September 2022 issue of Scientific American. Past Director’s Visitor George Musser takes account of the recent groundbreaking work being done on the infamous black hole information paradox by researchers including Member Ahmed Almheiri, who authors his own essay on the solution to the paradox.

"Natalie Paquette spends her time thinking about how to grow an extra dimension. Start with little circles, scattered across every point in space and time—a curlicue dimension, looped back onto itself. Then shrink those circles down, smaller and smaller, tightening the loop, until a curious transformation occurs: the dimension stops seeming tiny and instead becomes enormous, like when you realize something that looks small and nearby is actually huge and distant."

The Institute for Advanced Study has named Carl P. Feinberg—entrepreneur, investor, and philanthropist—to its Board of Trustees effective October 30, 2021.

The Strings 2021 conference, convening international experts and researchers to discuss string theory, takes place June 21–July 2, 2021, in São Paulo, Brazil. The annual international Strings conferences, which have been held every year since 1995...

[Updated March 23, 2021]

Wormholes are spacetime connections between distant spacetime regions. While some have speculated that they could be used to travel faster than light, our current understanding of general relativity and quantum matter seems...

The Carl P. Feinberg Cross-Disciplinary Program in Innovation at the Institute for Advanced Study will unite today’s boldest ideas in physics, mathematics, and beyond to unlock new and fascinating truths about the natural world. Endowed in...

By George Musser, Former Director's Visitor:

"In a series of breakthrough papers, theoretical physicists have come tantalizingly close to resolving the black hole information paradox that has entranced and bedeviled them for nearly 50 years. Information, they now say with confidence, does escape a black hole."

“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...