Physicists like to believe that their work reveals something deeply true about the Universe. Alien scientists, they suspect, are discovering the same concepts, even if they may express them in alien languages. But how do we know? If aliens arrived on Earth, could we use physics and math to bridge the gap? Before they arrive, we can glimpse the possibilities by looking at the foundations of physics, to search for clues about whether they are universal, or reflect something of our humanity.

Sound is more than something you hear: it’s a physical force that can push, pull, and even levitate objects. In this talk, David Goldhaber-Gordon explains how scientists and engineers use sound waves to move things too small to see with the naked eye.

This lecture traces the history of the Aspen Center for Physics and its broader impact through more than half a century of upheavals and changes in both science and society. It follows the Center from its early days as a utopian refuge from the strictly regimented environment of the Cold War-era research university, through turbulent years of federal funding cuts and political crises for American physics, and into years of growth and expanding influence during which the Center has come to serve as a prominent and internationally-imitated model for a new kind of scientific institution.

Which came first, the black hole or the galaxy? And how did black holes grow to be billions of times the mass of our Sun? Astronomers have made remarkable progress in answering these questions in the past five years, in large part thanks to the advent of the James Webb Space Telescope. Jenny Green discusses how the mysterious “Little Red Dots” discovered by James Webb may ultimately reveal the origin of supermassive black holes.

We have, for the first time, a physical path to storing information in the most efficient and fastest way allowed by nature. It can save the environment and accelerate AI and its connectivity to unprecedented speeds. There lies our salvation, but also our possible doom.

In science, random fluctuations (e.g., noise) are typically regarded as a nuisance to be minimized or avoided if possible. Yet in many important scenarios, valuable information can be gleaned from their careful study. In this talk, Ariel Amir discusses three such examples, from different disciplines.

Galaxies are complex collections of stars, gas, and dark matter. The largest galaxies host many of the Universe’s stars and harbor the most extreme supermassive black holes. Today these massive galaxies are ancient relics – they stopped forming stars long ago and shine with a dim, reddish glow.

Safronova describes how quantum clocks work can act as new observatories for this invisible universe, searching for subtle drifts in their ticking that could signal dark matter, and testing gravity on Earth and, in the future, in space.

This talk tells the story of symmetry in theoretical physics, and its interplay with developments in our understanding of gravity over the years. In this talk, McNamara explores the power of symmetry as a tool for building physical theories, and how the recent explosion of generalized notions of symmetry has led to concrete, specific predictions about our universe.

In this talk, Cranmer describes some of the ways that AI is revolutionizing science, and how these advances aren’t enabled by AI alone. He ends with some thoughts about what this means for the future of science.