“I think one has to regard it as a long term process. One has to remember that String theory, if you choose to date it from the Veneziano model, is already eighteen years old”

—  Edward Witten

"Edward Witten" interview, Superstrings: A Theory of Everything? (1992) ed. P.C.W. Davies, Julian Brown
Context: I think one has to regard it as a long term process. One has to remember that String theory, if you choose to date it from the Veneziano model, is already eighteen years old... that quantum electrodynamic theory towards which Planck was heading [in 1900], took fifty years to emerge.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "I think one has to regard it as a long term process. One has to remember that String theory, if you choose to date it f…" by Edward Witten?
Edward Witten photo
Edward Witten 20
American theoretical physicist 1951

Related quotes

Paul Dirac photo

“One possibility in this direction is to regard, classically, an electron as the end of a single Faraday line of force. The electric field in this picture from discrete Faraday lines of force, which are to be treated as physical things, like strings. One has then to develop a dynamics for such a string like structure, and quantize it…. In such a theory a bare electron would be inconceivable, since one cannot imagine the end of a piece of string without having the string.”

Paul Dirac (1902–1984) theoretical physicist

Bombay Lectures (1955)

Leonard Susskind photo

“Elegance requires that the number of defining equations be small. Five is better than ten, and one is better than five. On this score, one might facetiously say that String Theory is the ultimate epitome of elegance. With all the years that String Theory has been studied, no one has found even a single defining equation! The number at present count is zero. We know neither what the fundamental equations of the theory are nor even if it has any.”

Leonard Susskind book The Cosmic Landscape

[The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design, 2008, Little, Brown, https://books.google.com/books?id=RIW9E1sOyxUC&q=epitome#v=snippet&q=epitome&f=false]

Arundhati Roy photo

“Since it is September 11th we’re talking about, perhaps it’s in the fitness of things that we remember what that date means, not only to those who lost their loved ones in America last year, but to those in other parts of the world to whom that date has long held significance.”

Arundhati Roy (1961) Indian novelist, essayist

Source: Articles, Come September (29 Sep 2002)

Leon Fleisher photo

“First of all, when you enter a conservatory, it’s already too late. The kind of connection that has to be made with an instrument, be it a piano, strings, a wind instrument, it really has to start much younger – five, six, seven - eight years-old is already getting late. The instrument must really become an extension of yourself. That neuromuscular connection between intention and realization is something that really has to be started very young. And the years between nine or ten and twenty, that’s when one should learn the whole repertoire.”

Leon Fleisher (1928) American conductor and pianist

Interview with pianist Leon Fleisher http://www.examiner.com/article/interview-with-pianist-leon-fleisher by Elijah Ho (October 1, 2014)

John Burroughs photo

“Science has done more for the development of Western civilization in one hundred years than Christianity did in eighteen hundred.”

John Burroughs (1837–1921) American naturalist and essayist

Source: The Light of Day (1900), Ch. X: Religious Truth

Jenny Offill photo

“But my agent has a theory. She says every marriage is jerry-rigged. Even the ones that look reasonable from the outside are held together inside with chewing gum and wire and string.”

Jenny Offill book Dept. of Speculation

Source: Dept. of Speculation

Alyssa Milano photo

“The world has so much suffering in it already—choosing to be vegetarian is one thing you can do to reduce the suffering on a daily basis.”

Alyssa Milano (1972) American actress, singer, producer

Interview with peta2, as quoted in "Chrissie Hynde to NYC: No More Violence at Ground Zero" by PETA (13 October 2008) https://www.peta.org/blog/chrissie-hynde-nyc-violence-ground-zero/.

“Henri Poincaré thought the theory of infinite sets a grave malady and pathologic. "Later generations," he said in 1908, "will regard set theory as a disease from which one has recovered.”

Morris Kline (1908–1992) American mathematician

[Morris Kline, Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty, http://books.google.com/books?id=RNwnUL33epsC&pg=PA203, 1982, Oxford University Press, 978-0-19-503085-3, 203]

John Green photo

“[M]aybe the strings break, or maybe our ships sink, or maybe we're grass—our roots so interdependent that no one is dead as long as someone is still alive. We don't suffer from a shortage of metaphors, is what I mean. But you have to be careful which metaphor you choose, because it matters. If you choose the strings, then you're imagining a world in which you can become irreparably broken. If you choose the grass, you're saying that we are all infinitely interconnected, that we can use these root systems not only to understand one another but to become one another. The metaphors have implications.”

John Green book Paper Towns

Quentin "Q" Jacobsen, p. 301
Paper Towns (2008)

Related topics