"The willingness to make room for the unexpected is precisely what fundamental research requires."
In a recent Nature article, Prof. Alon Chen, together with the leaders of the Max Planck Society and the Institute for Advanced Study, reflects on the vision behind the Advanced Research Consortium (ARC), a new initiative designed to foster bold, curiosity-driven research across disciplines and borders.
What if the next breakthrough in science comes not from a single field, but from conversations across many of them?
In the article, Why We're Setting Up an Institute for Radically Broad Thinking, Weizmann Institute President Alon Chen, together with Max Planck Society President Patrick Cramer and Institute for Advanced Study Director David Nirenberg, argues that today's biggest challenges demand a new model for discovery: one that brings together researchers from across the sciences, social sciences, and humanities to pursue ambitious questions beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries.
At the center of this vision is the Advanced Research Consortium (ARC), a new partnership between the Weizmann Institute of Science, the Max Planck Society, and the Institute for Advanced Study. Based in Berlin, ARC is designed to foster fundamental, curiosity-driven research by giving scholars the time and freedom to pursue ambitious questions alongside collaborators from different disciplines.
Rather than organizing research around predefined agendas, ARC will bring researchers together around the questions themselves, encouraging new perspectives, unexpected connections, and entirely new ways of thinking.
For the Weizmann Institute, the initiative reflects a longstanding belief that transformative discoveries often begin with curiosity and the freedom to follow it wherever it leads.
"The willingness to make room for the unexpected is precisely what fundamental research requires."
As the authors note, many of history's most influential advances emerged when thinkers crossed boundaries and challenged conventional assumptions. ARC aims to create those conditions again, opening the door to discoveries, ideas, and collaborations that cannot yet be predicted.
Read the full article, Why We're Setting Up an Institute for Radically Broad Thinking, published in Nature.
