This is an extended version of my Nobel Lecture, delivered on December 8, 2021. I will
recall the genesis of the concept of multiple equilibria in natural sciences. I will then describe …

The physics of the glass transition and amorphous materials continues to attract the attention
of a wide research community after decades of effort. Supercooled liquids and glasses have …

Glasses are amorphous solids whose constituent particles are caged by their neighbours
and thus cannot flow. This sluggishness is often ascribed to the free energy landscape …

Despite decades of work, gaining a first-principles understanding of amorphous materials
remains an extremely challenging problem. However, recent theoretical breakthroughs have …

The configurational entropy is one of the most important thermodynamic quantities
characterizing supercooled liquids approaching the glass transition. Despite decades of …

The routine transformation of a liquid, as it is rapidly cooled, resulting in glass formation, is
remarkably complex. A theoretical explanation of the dynamics associated with this process …

Recent theoretical advances offer an exact, first-principles theory of jamming criticality in
infinite dimension as well as universal scaling relations between critical exponents in all …

We study a well known neural network model—the perceptron—as a simple statistical
physics model of jamming of hard objects. We exhibit two regimes:(1) a convex optimization …

Note: This Perspective offers a progress report for the Simons collaboration “Cracking the
Glass Problem,” of which the authors are some of the principal investigators. While the …

One of the most actively debated issues in the study of the glass transition is whether a
mean-field description is a reasonable starting point for understanding experimental glass …