Social Science
By Didier Fassin
Cyclical movement of nature and worldly events, biology and biography: these are the two series that make life an entity at once overdetermined in its material dimension and indeterminate in its course . . . Can this binarism be resolved? Is it possible to think of life as biology and life as biography together?
Historical Studies
By Angelos Chaniotis
There is no such thing as a homogeneous European culture, with which the Bosnian Muslims, the third-generation Turks in Germany, the Greeks, the Roma, the French Jews, the Basques, and the Laps––not to mention the Indians and Pakistanis living in London––can identify themselves.
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?
Social Science
By Hugh Gusterson
As I toured the National Ignition Facility, I noticed a big banner that said “stockpile stewardship is working!” But how do we know? Maybe what really matters is not whether a nuclear weapon really works but whether we believe it does.
Natural Sciences
By Juan Maldacena
What if black holes behave like ordinary quantum mechanical objects—and information about them is not lost, as previously thought, but retained on their horizons?
Mathematics
By Ana Pires
During the winter of 1924–25 at the University of Göttingen, David Hilbert gave a series of lectures about the infinite in mathematics, physics, and astronomy.
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.
By Daniela Luigia Caglioti
The outbreak of the war transformed them––independently of their personal story, feelings, ideas, and sense of belonging––into enemy aliens, accused of posing a threat to national security. As the war went on, the campaign against enemy aliens extended well beyond individuals who had originated from an enemy country. The loyalty of groups of citizens was questioned based on ethnic origin, religious belief, or former nationality.
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.
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.
By Paul Seidel
When going about the mind-bending business of revisiting our concept of space, how can the imagination keep a foothold? A long-standing tradition is to imagine oneself a traveler in a faraway place. At various times, this kind of fiction has enabled us to conceive of the moon and planets as earthlike bodies; to live in more or less than two dimensions; or to run alongside a beam of light. It will hopefully also help us here.
By Freeman J. Dyson
I do not take the Prisoner’s Dilemma seriously as a model of evolution of cooperation. I consider it likely that groups lacking cooperation are like dodoes, losing the battle for survival collectively rather than individually.
By Yve-Alain Bois
I think there is no better introduction to Kelly’s work than his earlier years in Paris, especially when it comes to understanding why things that look apparently very simple are in fact much more complex than they seem. This is something that we easily accept from science—no one doubts that the hyper-simple equation E=mc2 is the tip of an immensely complicated iceberg—but we usually have a harder time accepting it from art.
Historical Studies
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
By Yve-Alain Bois
Shortly before he started using the concept of the unconscious in his statements, Matisse had made reference to “reflex” . . . akin to what Henri Bergson, the only philosopher he is known to have read with some constancy, called the “memory of the body,” and to what Marcel Proust called the “involuntary memory of limbs.”
By Yve-Alain Bois
There is an obvious playfulness in the way Picasso constantly shifted his artistic identity when least expected. Like Harlequin, a character with whom he identified all his life and of whom he drew and painted many versions in various, often incompatible styles, he could become anything he wanted, put on any mask, take out any card from his sleeve.
