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On the Work of Edward Witten (1990) [pdf]
- HerrMonnezza 9y agoSmall correction to the submission title: it's "Witten" not "Whitten"
- dang 9y agoWhoops! Thanks, fixed.
- fwdpropaganda 9y agoPhysicist here. Just wanted to add a little context. Anyone in string theory will tell you that Witten is possibly the greatest physicist that has ever lived. Interestingly he's completely unknown to the general public.
- danharaj 9y ago> Anyone in string theory will tell you that Witten is possibly the greatest physicist that has ever lived. Betcha experimentalists would disagree.
- fwdpropaganda 9y agoNot sure what you're talking about... The vast majority of experimentalists would not understand his work. That's why I used the qualifier "in string theory". You could as well have said that most biologists would disagree, would make about as much sense.
- Koshkin 9y agoHe probably means that theoretical physics is not the whole physics.
- fwdpropaganda 9y agoSure, but these days it's where discoveries are made. You know, in some sense experimental physics used to be "ahead" of theoretical physics. I accidentally put some current next to a compass and it moves. Why, no one knows. I would say from 1905 onwards theoretical physics has been ahead of experimental physics. I have reasons to believe X, and a few years later experimentalists verify it. This difference is getting larger very fast. It took from 1933 when neutrinos were postulated by Fermi to being discovered in 1956. It took about 40 years from Higgs suspecting an extra particle was needed to it being found in experiments.
- pvg 9y agoMaybe that's cheating a little but astronomy and astrophysics have had a good run of observations which physical cosmology then chases. Most of them after 1905.
- danharaj 9y agoHigh energy physics isn't the only physics. It's not even the only physics that uses the shiniest toys of theoretical physics.
- hpcjoe 9y agoHeh ... in grad school, one of my friends was a postdoc working on computing bounds for the Higgs mass. He used to tell me (theoretical condensed matter) that I worked in the dirt left over from the real physics. Fast forward 20+ years, and he is working on modeling semiconductor growth (like I was to a degree), and I am long gone from physics. Skipped postdoc/tenure track to go into industry post Ph.D. My impression dealing with HEP folks for many years, is that a fairly large fraction of folks in the field look down on the rest of the world. Similar with the nuclear people. This is anecdotal of course, and a small subjectively interpreted sampling. All that said ... One of the more interesting aspects of string theory is that it appears to have analogues and applications in superfluidity, and other phenomenon where you get spontaneous symmetry breaking[1], or where you have critical exponents and length scales[2]. [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1507.05635 https://arxiv.org/abs/1507.05635 [2] https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/string-theory-methods-for-condensed-matter-physics/F9D08031D2147BD474C35ACBF97E6A28 https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/string-theory-methods-f...
- abecedarius 9y agoWhat happens to that evaluation if string theory never has a successful experimental prediction? Is there some way his work would keep such a high standing as physics then? No argument that he must be incredibly smart, but that's not the same. My layperson's impression is that string theory implies supersymmetry and supersymmetry doesn't easily comport with the latest accelerator results.
- fwdpropaganda 9y ago> What happens to that evaluation if string theory never has a successful experimental prediction? Exact Lorentz is a very successful experimental prediction of string theory. > My layperson's impression is that string theory implies supersymmetry and supersymmetry doesn't easily comport with the latest accelerator results. Symmetry breaking.
- abecedarius 9y agoThat special relativity continues to hold at high energy is not a new prediction. It does distinguish string theory from some other guesses at new physics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supersymmetry_breaking_scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supersymmetry_breaking_scale implies LHC was expected to show evidence of supersymmetry. That's what I was thinking of by 'easily'. Anyway, I guess you are saying he's the greatest ever because of string theory? And we'll just have to see if that pans out as physics.
- fwdpropaganda 9y ago> That special relativity continues to hold at high energy is not a new prediction. It does distinguish string theory from some other guesses at new physics. Moving goal posts. First you asked for predictions, now you're asking for "new" predictions. Anyway, what does "new" even mean? Some theories say it holds, some theories says it doesn't. String theory says it does, and it's correct.
- abecedarius 9y ago
- msds 9y agoEven if they're not in string theory, they'll probably say something like that, or perhaps imply that he's actually an alien super-intelligence...
- fwdpropaganda 9y agoIsn't there actually an xkcd for that? Can't find it now, maybe I'm imagining.
- auntienomen 9y agoGreatest is a complicated word. But smartest is a real possibility. I think von Neumann was the last person who matched Witten's raw intellect.
- a_d 9y agoTwo years ago, I had the profound honor of having lunch with Prof Witten. He is also a very kind and generous human being. A small tidbit I learned: He spends a disproportionate amount of time thinking, and very little time on the desk with a pen and a paper. His students told me that he likes to work things out in his head -- which could last for days -- before he would commit things to paper. I thought that was interesting, although not unexpected for a genius at his level. If I am not mistaken, he is the most cited theoretical physicist. He deserves to be celebrated in popular culture -- like Einstein and Newton. For me, he is the definition of a "living legend".
- goldenkey 9y agoMy memory isn't as good as it used to be. I thought the article was about Edward Frenkel at first who wrote the fantastic novel Love and Math [1]. It's about his life growing up in Soviet Russia as a Jewish mathematician. He was good friends with the famed physicist Murray Gell-Mann who discovered a theory of hadrons, leading to the quark model we have today [2]. In the novel he talks about some of the groundbreaking work he has done. But he's mostly known for his cinema work on the emotional fullness of mathematics and physics. I would nominate him for a Nobel if I could. But Fields medals are about pure mathematical achievement, right? So I'm not sure he would qualify. [1] http://amzn.to/2HKD3Mc http://amzn.to/2HKD3Mc [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eightfold_Way_(physics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eightfold_Way_(physics)
- auntienomen 9y agoFrenkel was tenured at Berkeley in his early 20s, at an age when most people are still in grad school. His mathematical achievements are substantial. I've no doubt that he was on the list of candidates for the Fields at some point in the late 90s & early 2000s.