1198: Edward Witten-ing
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Medium (Personal)
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/05/13
1987
“It is very possible that a proper understanding of string theory will make the space‑time continuum melt away … String theory is a miracle through and through.”
“Vibrating strings in 10 dimensions is just a weird fact … An explanation of that weird fact would tell you why there are 10 dimensions in the first place.”
“I don’t think that any physicist would have been clever enough to have invented string theory on purpose … Luckily, it was invented by accident.”
1992
“Quantum mechanics … developed through some rather messy, complicated processes stimulated by experiment. While it’s a very rich and wonderful theory, it doesn’t quite have the conceptual foundation of general relativity. Our problem in physics is that everything is based on these two different theories and when we put them together we get nonsense.”
“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 … it’s difficult to do things which are even internally coherent, much less correct … that is one of the main reasons we are still able to make advances.”
“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 toward which Planck was heading [in 1900] took fifty years to emerge.”
“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 … physics is about concepts, wanting to understand the concepts, the principles by which the world works.”
1995
“String theory is extremely attractive because gravity is forced upon us. All known consistent string theories include gravity, so while gravity is impossible in quantum field theory as we have known it, it is obligatory in string theory.”
1996
“It was clear that if I didn’t spend the rest of my life concentrating on string theory, I would simply be missing my life’s calling.”
“Even though it is, properly speaking, a post‑prediction — in the sense that the experiment was made before the theory — the fact that gravity is a consequence of string theory, to me, is one of the greatest theoretical insights ever.”
“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 …”
“Good wrong ideas are extremely scarce … and good wrong ideas that even remotely rival the majesty of string theory have never been seen.”
1998
“M‑theory … a deeper, unique and more profound theory called ‘M‑theory,’ where M stands for magic, mystery, or membrane, according to taste.”
1999
“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 … Discovery of supersymmetry would certainly give string theory an enormous boost.”
2003
“String theory is an attempt at a deeper description of nature by thinking of an elementary particle not as a little point but as a little loop of vibrating string.”
2006
“The greatest intellectual thrill of my life was learning that string theory could encompass both gravity and quantum mechanics.”
2010
“If I take the theory as we have it now, literally, I would conclude that extra dimensions really exist. They’re part of nature.”
2016
“I think consciousness will remain a mystery … I have a much easier time imagining how we understand the Big Bang than I have imagining how we can understand consciousness.”
2017
“Physics in quantum field theory and string theory somehow has a lot of mathematical secrets in it, which we don’t know how to extract in a systematic way.”
2019
“I’ve come to terms with the landscape idea and the sense of not being upset about it, as I was for many years.”
“… I’ve come to believe that the whole ‘it from qubit’ stuff — the relation between geometry and entanglement — is the most interesting direction.”
“The intimate tie between math and physics seems to be a fact of life. I can’t imagine what it would mean to explain it.”
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