Edward Witten: Physical

“Physics has progressed to a domain where experiment is a little difficult… Nevertheless, the fact that we have a rich logical structure which constrains us a lot in terms of what is consistent, is one of the main reasons we are still able to make advances.”

Edward Witten

"Edward Witten" interview, Superstrings: A Theory of Everything? (1992) ed. P.C.W. Davies, Julian Brown
Context: In Newton's day the problem was to write something which was correct - he never had the problem of writing nonsense, but by the twentieth century we have a rich conceptual framework with relativity and quantum mechanics and so on. In this framework it's difficult to do things which are even internally coherent, much less correct. Actually, that's fortunate in the sense that it's one of the main tools we have in trying to make progress in physics. Physics has progressed to a domain where experiment is a little difficult... Nevertheless, the fact that we have a rich logical structure which constrains us a lot in terms of what is consistent, is one of the main reasons we are still able to make advances.

“I would expect that a proper elucidation of what string theory really is all about would involve a revolution in our concepts of the basic laws of physics - similar in scope to any that occurred in the past.”

Edward Witten

"Edward Witten" interview, Superstrings: A Theory of Everything? (1992) ed. P.C.W. Davies, Julian Brown

Law , Past

“If supersymmetry plays the role in physics that we suspect it does, then it is very likely to be discovered by the next generation of particle accelerators, either at Fermilab… or at CERN… Discovery of supersymmetry would be one of the real milestones in physics, made even more exciting by its close links to still more ambitious theoretical ideas. Indeed, supersymmetry is one of the basic requirements of "string theory," which is the framework in which theoretical physicists have had some success in unifying gravity with the rest of the elementary particle forces. Discovery of supersymmetry would would certainly give string theory an enormous boost.”

Edward Witten

Foreward, written June 30, 1999, to Supersymmetry: Unveiling the Ultimate Laws of Nature (2000) by Gordon Kane

Idea , Success

“Generally speaking, all the really great ideas of physics are really spin-offs of string theory… Some of them were discovered first, but I consider that a mere accident of the development on planet earth.”

Edward Witten

as quoted by John Horgan, The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age (1996)
Context: Generally speaking, all the really great ideas of physics are really spin-offs of string theory... Some of them were discovered first, but I consider that a mere accident of the development on planet earth. On planet earth, they were discovered in this order [general relativity, quantum field theory, superstrings, and supersymmetry]... But I don't believe, if there are many civilizations in the universe, that those four ideas were discovered in that order in each civilization.

Idea

“Most people who haven't been trained in physics probably think of what physicists do as a question of incredibly complicated calculations, but that's not really the essence of it. The essence of it is that physics is about concepts, wanting to understand the concepts, the principles by which the world works.”

Edward Witten

"Edward Witten" interview, Superstrings: A Theory of Everything? (1992) ed. P.C.W. Davies, Julian Brown

People , World , Understanding , Question

“Just around the same time that the string picture was formed, asymptotic freedom was discovered and made possible, in QCD, a more precise and successful theory of the strong interactions. Yet there has always been a striking analogy between QCD and string theory. If the hypothesis of quark confinement in QCD is true in its usual form, than a widely separated quark and antiquark are joined by a “color flux tube.” This has an obvious analogy to the notion of a meson as a string with charges at its ends, as assumed in string theory. Explaining this analogy would mean understanding quark confinement. This would be quite a nice achievement, since it is a longstanding sore point in theoretical physics that despite real experiments and computer simulations supporting the quark confinement hypothesis and despite a lot of ingenious work explaining qualitative criteria for quark confinement and why this notion is natural, there is no convincing, pencil and paper demonstration of quark confinement in QCD.”

Edward Witten

Color , Understanding , Support , Nature

“Even before string theory, especially as physics developed in the 20th century, it turned out that the equations that really work in describing nature with the most generality and the greatest simplicity are very elegant and subtle.”

Edward Witten

in a NOVA interview Viewpoints on String Theory, Edward Witten http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/elegant/view-witten.html, July 2003.

Nature