“Between sessions at a physics conference, I asked a number of attendees: Who is the smartest physicist of them all? …the name mentioned most often was Witten's. He seemed to evoke a special kind of awe, as though he belonged to a category unto himself. He is often likened to Einstein; one colleague reached even further back for a comparison, suggesting that Witten possessed the greatest mathematical mind since Newton.”

— John Horgan (journalist)

Source: The End of Science (1996), p. 60

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John Horgan (journalist) 14

American science journalist 1953

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John Horgan (journalist) 14

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