Physics

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...

How does science work? . . . The scientific method—famously objective, logical and eminently reliable; and the fruits of its success, both pure and applied, are the single most obvious factor in distinguishing the varying levels of progress between...

Lawrence Krauss, Member (2005) in the School of Natural Sciences, asks "What if the world around us is just a shadow of reality?" in the New Yorker's Elements.

... The notion that the world of our experience is an accident of our particular...

Time crystals are hypothetical structures that pulse without requiring any energy—like a ticking clock that never needs winding. The pattern repeats in time in much the same way that the atoms of a crystal repeat in space. The idea was so...

In Quanta's Abstractions blog, top women in mathematics and physics, including Miranda Cheng, Visitor (2011) in the School of Natural Sciences, Tracy Slatyer, Member (2010–13) in the School, Maria Chudnovsky, Veblen Research Instructor (2003–05) in...

In the 1960s, the charismatic physicist Geoffrey Chew, Member (1956) in the School of Mathematics/Natural Sciences, espoused a radical vision of the universe, and with it, a new way of doing physics, arguing that "Nature is as it is because this is...

On April 14, 1954, Albert Einstein, one of the Institute's first Faculty members (1933–55), gave the last lecture of his life. Speaking to physics students at Princeton University, he remarked that although quantum mechanics works, “it is difficult...

Steven Weinberg discusses how the development of quantum mechanics in the first decades of the twentieth century came as a shock to many physicists. Today, despite the great successes of quantum mechanics, arguments continue about its meaning, and...

In 1930, the Institute for Advanced Study was established near the grounds of Princeton University to act as the "department store for the freedom of ideas." The original and often speculative thinking that the Institute encouraged over the years...

One gets the sense that Freeman Dyson has seen everything. It’s not just that at 92 he’s had a front row seat on scientific breakthroughs for the past century, or that he’s been friends and colleagues with many of the giants of 20th-century physics...