Anthony Zee

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Anthony Zee holds a joint appointment as a permanent member of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics and a professor of physics at the University of California at Santa Barbara. While his main areas of research involve cosmology and the fundamental structure of matter, he is known in the theoretical physics community for his unusual breadth of interests, from condensed matter physics to biophysics. He is the author of several works of nonfiction, most recently the textbook Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell (Princeton University Press, 2003) and Einstein’s Universe: Gravity at Work and Play (Oxford University Press, 2001).

As a Radcliffe fellow, Zee will devote half his time to writing and half to theoretical physics. He will complete his book Dark Energy: Song of the Yin in a Mysterious Universe (forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux)—a mix of fictional and nonfictional elements—and will begin other writing projects.

Zee received his AB from Princeton University and his AM and PhD from Harvard University. He has published well over two hundred articles in physics journals and has also lectured outside the physics world several times, including at a conference of the International Association of Culinary Professionals and at various art centers. He has been a visiting professor at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, and the Chinese University of Hong Kong, among other institutions.