Nathan Seiberg, 64, still does a lot of the electrical work and even some of the plumbing around his house in Princeton, New Jersey. It’s an interest he developed as a kid growing up in Israel, where he tinkered with his car and built a radio.
“I was always fascinated by solving problems and understanding how things work,” he said.
Seiberg’s professional career has been about problem solving, too, though nothing as straightforward as fixing radios. He’s a physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study, and over the course of a long and decorated career he has made many contributions to the development of quantum field theory, or QFT.
QFT refers broadly to the set of all possible quantum field theories. These are theories whose basic objects are “fields,” which stretch across space and time. There are fields associated with fundamental particles like electrons and quarks, and fields associated with fundamental forces, like gravity and electromagnetism. The most sweeping quantum field theory — and the most successful theory in the history of physics, period — is the Standard Model. It combines these fields into a single equation that explains nearly every aspect of the physical world.
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