Ideas

Quantum theory radically transforms our fundamental understanding of physical reality. It reveals that the world contains a hidden richness of structure that we have barely begun to control and exploit. According to quantum theory, what we perceive...

If two such great thinkers as Bohr and Einstein, who had such a high regard for each other, could be brought together for a prolonged period, would not something emerge of great value to all of us? This thought and this hope animated the guiding spirits of the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study to invite Niels Bohr to come as a guest of the Institute for the entire spring semester of 1939.

On March 28, 2009, a nine-year-old girl visited a clinic near San Diego with a fever and cough. Similar cases of febrile respiratory illness followed within the next two weeks in several places in California and Texas. At the same time, Mexican...

I arrived at the Institute for Advanced Study in October 2003, after spending two years as a fellow at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, in Geneva, Switzerland. For any theoretical physicist the Institute is a mythical place, and the offer to become a Member presented the possibility of a life-changing experience.

I am very skeptical about all the pronouncements that are made by the experts. I know how completely uncertain the subject is. But I don’t claim to be an expert myself, so I won’t argue with anybody about details. And I am certainly not a spokesman...

Bodies bound by gravity can evolve in surprising ways. In accord with everyday experience and physical law, heat flows from regions of high to low temperature, and angular momentum from regions of fast to slow spin. However, counter to intuition, in...

For slightly over a year, I have largely put aside my longtime interests in the foundations of quantum mechanics and in particle physics, and have been working on dark matter. This interest came about in two different ways. The first was a paper on...

Physicists have used Feynman diagrams as a tool for calculating scattering amplitudes that describe particle interactions for more than six decades. Their broad utility was due initially in large part to the seminal work of Freeman Dyson, Professor...

“Scientific research in many domains of knowledge has time after time proved the necessity of abandoning or remoulding viewpoints which, due to their fruitfulness and apparently unrestricted applicability, were regarded as indispensable for rational...

This sketch of earlier attempts to bring biology to the Institute for Advanced Study is not a history. I have not dug into the archives to find official documents and exact dates. I am only recording my own fallible memories of events that I either...