Ideas

Natural Sciences

Topology and Physics

By Clay Cordova

As part of Ideas: Celebrating 2017–18, Clay Cordova, Marvin L. Goldberger Member in the School of ...

Natural Sciences

Maker of Patterns: An Autobiography Through Letters

By Freeman J. Dyson

On April 13, 2018, the Institute gathered in celebration of Professor Emeritus Freeman Dyson's Maker of Patterns: An Autobiography through Letters. In this public lecture, Dyson reads brief excerpts from the...

Natural Sciences

Stephen Hawking 1942–2018

On Einstein's birthday we mourn the passing of Stephen Hawking, an equally brilliant mind and inspiring human being. His ideas about black holes, spacetime and the Big Bang will live forever, only grow in...

Natural Sciences

Dark Matter: Discerning What We Cannot See

By Vera Gluscevic

The Institute Letter Spring 2018

The field of cosmology has come a long way toward understanding the universe as a physical system: we’ve mapped its history and structure in great detail, we know what it went through since a few seconds after its birth until today, we understand...

Natural Sciences

Dust, Distortions, and Shadows in the Universe's Oldest Light

By James Colin Hill

How did the universe begin? What are its constituents?

In this video, James Colin Hill, Friends of the Institute Member in the School of Natural Sciences, explores these questions and discusses recent challenges and controversies that...

Natural Sciences

Ahmed Almheiri: From the UAE to Firewalls

By Kelly Devine Thomas

The Institute Letter Fall 2017

In 2012, Ahmed Almheiri, current Member in the School of Natural Sciences, coauthored a paper that confounded theoretical physicists, sparked attention from the New York Times to Scientific...

Natural Sciences

Videos from Prospects in Theoretical Physics 2017

PiTP 2017, titled "Particle Physics at the LHC and Beyond," took place from July 17 to July 28, 2017, and covered topics ranging from experimental results in particle physics to prospects for physics beyond the standard model. ...

Natural Sciences

Black Holes and the Butterfly Effect

By Douglas Stanford

The Institute Letter Spring 2017

One of the surprising things about chaos is that it took so long for physicists to appreciate how common it is. This is despite the fact that people seem to come naturally programmed with intuition for the basic phenomenon: that small changes to...

Natural Sciences

The Magic of Light and Color

By Robbert Dijkgraaf

Robbert Dijkgraaf, Director and Leon Levy Professor, explores the magic of light and color in this Science Talk for Families event.

Natural Sciences

The Most Wanted Man in China

By Li-Zhi Fang

The Institute Letter Summer 2016

When Fang Lizhi, one of China’s most distinguished scientists, began in 1986 to talk to his students about the “universal rights” of human beings, he knew the risks. In those days, the use of the term “rights” in China was highly sensitive,...

Ideas

A Mathematical Rosetta Stone

By Robbert Dijkgraaf

It is difficult to convey the enormous impact of his revolutionary idea. Langlands showed how the same formula can originate from two entirely different worlds of thought. To employ another metaphor: it is as if two chefs cooking with two entirely different recipes, ingredients, and methods of preparation, produce exactly the same dish.

Historical Studies

The Necessity of a Historical Approach to Islamic Theology

By Kelly Devine Thomas

There is also a very important mission for a Western audience, namely to show the intellectual richness of the Islamic world and make it available and not only to create awareness for this intellectual richness but also respect.

Natural Sciences

Ahmed Almheiri: From the UAE to Firewalls

By Kelly Devine Thomas

In 2012, Ahmed Almheiri, current Member in the School of Natural Sciences, coauthored a paper that confounded theoretical physicists, sparked attention from the New York Times to Scientific American, and prompted the organization of workshops and the publication of dozens of papers around the world.

Historical Studies

Leonardo’s Watery Chaos

By Irving Lavin

Leonardo was truly enthralled, not to say obsessed, by water—so much so that this fact in itself calls for explanation.

Historical Studies

History, Climate, and the New Past

By Nicola Di Cosmo

Seen in the light of the antiquarian precedent, there is reason to believe that the contribution of the sciences of the past to historical research can help produce new histories. Yet, a word of caution is required.

Social Science

Legacies of Twentieth-Century Communism

By Kristen Rogheh Ghodsee

That day in Jena, I felt the past alive in the present and understood that the legacies of the fall of communism infused current European political realities. Why else would East Germans in 2016 resurrect a protest slogan from 1989?

Social Science

A World of Prisons: An Ethnography of the Carceral Condition

By Didier Fassin

In France, the expansion of the prison population with its socioracial component occurred at the very moment when socioeconomic inequalities started to deepen after a long period of contraction and when ethnoracial minorities became the target of stigmatization campaigns from right-wing parties. The penal state has definitely been a way of governing the poor.

Social Science

We Have to Go Beyond Identifying and Punishing Individual Men

By Joan Wallach Scott

There seems to be a persistent belief—deeply rooted in our psyches—that men achieve recognition of their masculinity, and so of their political and social power, by exercising domination over women.

Mathematics

How Could Machines Learn as Efficiently as Animals and Humans?

By Yann LeCun

There has been a bit of a revolution in the last few years in what we now call artificial intelligence. . . . Although we haven’t yet figured out how the brain learns, we have been able to reproduce some aspects of it.

Historical Studies

Authoritarian Culture in the Arab World

By Kevin W Martin

After seizing power on his own behalf in December 1949, Army Colonel Adib al-Shishakli effectively ruled Syria for much of the next five years, during which he wrought long-term changes in Syria’s political culture and initiated a host of policies and practices subsequently adopted by Egypt’s Gamal Abdul Nasser, Syria’s Hafez al-Assad, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, and other authoritarian rulers.

Historical Studies

For a Different History of the Seventh Century C.E.

By Muriel Debie

An arcane topic to most people, Syriac sources help shed a more complex light on the history of the Middle East from late antiquity to the Middle Ages. They reveal a non-imperial epoch and its rich contributions to the cultural and religious history of the region.

Natural Sciences

Black Holes and the Butterfly Effect

By Douglas Stanford

Natural Sciences

Unfashionable Pursuits, Leaps in the Dark, and Detecting Gravitational Waves

By Freeman J. Dyson

Great scientists start new fields of science by making leaps in the dark. Nature decides which of the leaps is right and which is wrong. The Institute can be proud that we supported both Einstein and Joseph Weber, great scientists with their risky ventures, more than half a century before Nature proved them right and wrong.

Ideas

The IAS Questionnaire

Astrophysicist David Spergel on what determines his focus, the most surprising thing he’s learned, and the questions that he’d most like answered

Natural Sciences

The Advent and Fallout of EPR

By Kelly Devine Thomas

An IAS teatime conversation in 1935 between Nathan Rosen, Boris Podolsky, and Albert Einstein, about a fundamental issue of interpretation related to entangled wave-functions, introduced an ongoing debate over quantum physics.

Natural Sciences

A New Era of Gravitational-Wave Astronomy

The first detection of gravitational waves brought with it spacetime ripples, black-hole collisions, and surprising systems.

Natural Sciences

The Astrophysics Behind LIGO’s Detection

By Doron Kushnir

Long before they reached the required sensitivity to detect a merger of two neutron stars, the LIGO detectors observed a gravitational-wave signal from a black hole–black hole merger about one billion light years away.

Ideas

The Power of Mirror Symmetry

By Robbert Dijkgraaf

A striking example of the magic of quantum theory is mirror symmetry—a truly astonishing equivalence of spaces that has revolutionized geometry.

Mathematics

The Geometry of Random Spaces

By Matthew Kahle

I sometimes like to think about what it might be like inside a black hole. What does that even mean? Is it really “like” anything inside a black hole? Nature keeps us from ever knowing. But mathematics and physics make some predictions.

Mathematics

Charting One’s Course through Mirror Symmetry

By Paul Seidel

Today it seems clear that, in order for geometric thinking to remain a source of new insights (in mathematics, physics, computer science . . .), geometry must continue to evolve.

Mathematics

My Random Walks with Pólya and Szegő

By Olga Holtz

I read the introduction to Mathematics and Plausible Reasoning and its Chapter I standing up next to the bookshelf. It read like a novel. A cerebral one alright, which made you pay quick attention. Chapter I started out in the least orthodox way, comparing mathematical induction to a domino chain. The book endeavoured to explain not only what was mathematically true but how and why. I was hooked.

Historical Studies

Genetics and Identity

By Patrick J. Geary

The imagined unity of a people could derive from shared customs, language, a common law, and a belief in a common origin, whether or not this origin was factual.

Social Science

Promoting Human Rights and Democracy in China

By Teng Biao

“Think independently!”––I can still remember well how excited I was the first time I heard this sentence.

Historical Studies

The Zaydi Manuscript Tradition

By Sabine Schmidtke

The Yemeni manuscript collections constitute a unique treasure trove for large segments of the Islamic intellectual tradition—Sunni as well as Shii.

Historical Studies

Erwin Panofsky–Jan van Eyck–Philip Pearlstein

By Irving Lavin

The portrait of art historian Erwin Panofsky, late Professor in the School of Historical Studies, installed in the Institute’s Historical Studies–Social Science Library, was commissioned from Philip Pearlstein in 1993. The portrait was the result of a series of coincidences that Panofsky liked to call “accidents on the highways of tradition,” this time involving a collision of at least a half-dozen vehicles of history.

Ideas

Foreign Policy and Historical Analogy

By Jonathan Finer

Having worked closely with outstanding scientists ... I came to appreciate how essential such expertise and perspectives are to policymaking.

Natural Sciences

The Prisoner’s Dilemma

By Freeman J. Dyson

I do not take the Prisoner’s Dilemma seriously as a model of evolution of cooperation, because I consider it likely that groups lacking cooperation are like dodoes, losing the battle for survival collectively rather than individually.

Social Science

Terrorism and Just War

By Michael Walzer

What is wrong with terrorism? How is terrorism chosen—picked out of all the possible political strategies? How ought we to fight against terrorism? Or better, what are the moral limits that anti-terrorists ought to recognize?

Historical Studies

Embedded Portraits: Appending a New Myth to an Old Myth

By Christopher S. Wood

The world is emergent and always unfolding in time. Painting has difficulty representing this kind of time. The portrait tries to do that, paradoxically, by representing the individual fixed in historical time.

Historical Studies

Picasso and Abstraction: Encounters and Avoidance

By Yve-Alain Bois

Picasso did not speak often about abstraction, but when he did, it was either to dismiss it as complacent decoration or to declare its very notion an oxymoron. But though he swore to never again go near abstraction, he could not resist testing his resolve.