As a young professor at Harvard University in 1997, Juan Maldacena reshaped fundamental physics with the discovery that, as he put it, “you can create a universe in a bottle.”

The Argentinian-American theorist found a mathematical correspondence between a certain bendy, bounded space-time environment — the universe in the bottle — and a special quantum theory describing particles on the bottle’s rigid surface, which seems to project the dynamic interior like a hologram. Maldacena’s discovery has enabled physicists to probe black holes and quantum gravity inside the imaginary bottled universe by studying corresponding properties of the gravity-free surface. His paper introducing the so-called AdS/CFT correspondence (which links “anti-de Sitter spaces” and “conformal field theories”) has been cited more than 15,000 times, or about twice per day on average over the past two decades, making it the most highly cited paper ever in high-energy physics.

Maldacena was working alone in his bare office at Harvard’s Jefferson Laboratory when the insight came. While others might find inspiration in features from the actual universe, he thinks best when he can leave just about everything behind. The office “had no decorations,” he said. “For me any quiet place with no visual or auditory distractions would work.”

In 2001, Maldacena moved to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, a pastoral campus free of students and teaching duties where worldly distractions are minimized by design. There, his deep insights have continued to surface. In 2002, he conceived of the ultimate test for cosmic inflation — the modern Big Bang theory — by predicting subtle but theoretically detectable shapes in the sky, which experiments will look for in the coming years.