3 ms·

Except, I've never heard of Ed Witten and I'm pretty sure people had heard of Einstein during his lifetime.

nonameiguess 3y ago
I didn't recognize the name but figured he was the guy who came up with M-theory, and sure enough, that's him. I believe the point here is achieving a legacy within the academy, not being known in pop culture. I think there's a lot of ambivalence about his influence, but it's definitely been large. His papers revealing how the whole superstring thing can be constructed in a way that doesn't blatantly contradict observed reality diverted at least a generation of theorists into the search for the holy grail of a theory of everything, but because we have no means of experiementally probing anything at the scales involved, it has also turned a generation of physicists into algebraic topologists largely divorced from experimental practice. You can think of him maybe like the Velvet Underground of physicists. They never achieved much popularity themselves, but virtually every rock band of the past 40 years that has gotten popular cites them as an influence, and many artists would rather have that as a legacy than popularity. Similarity, I think a lot of physicists would rather be well known and influential to other physicists rather than becoming the next Michio Kaku or someone else who shows up on television a lot.
- PaulHoule 3y ago
  In fundamental physics there are few very hard problems that are unambiguously real problems of which I would name: (1) what is dark matter? (2) what is the mass of the neutrino? (3) why is there so much matter in the universe and not so much antimatter? (4) Quite a few strange things about very high energy cosmic rays (Notably 2 is not "physics beyond the standard model", it is "a missing piece of the standard model") A lot of other questions might not really be "real" in various senses like: it's interesting to speculate that the interior of a quantum black hole is entirely unlike a classical black hole but you're not going to have anyone take a look and come back and tell us and we can just speculate if something kills you at the apparent horizon or not (so many bad ideas including the idea there is an "information paradox" come out believing the classical picture of the black hole interior which is probably just wrong), the "hierarchy problem" and various allergies to fine tuning are really human preferences or things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anomalous_magnetic_dipole_moment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anomalous_magnetic_dipole_mome... where between the experimental errors and the possibility that theorists aren't quite doing the math right and that the answers to 1-4 might account for any difference (I wouldn't be surprised it is if 1-4 have the same answer) The experiments for (1) and (2) are devilishly hard, there are accelerator observations of CP violations that are a line on (3), but the cosmic scale of (3) and (4) imposes its own difficulties. Really there are a lot of grad students chasing a moderate number of postdocs who hope to get one of very few permanent positions and out of it all there is a tiny amount of glory to be had. Condensed matter physics lacks the cosmic difficulties but it isn't dramatically better. How superconductivity works in cuprates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-temperature_superconductivity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-temperature_superconducti... is still quite mysterious after 35 years. I would name check Mark Newman as a standout in the "complex systems" area but the real accomplishment he made in my mind wasn't finding an explanation for "universal" power laws in complex systems but instead proving we didn't know what we were doing when we plotted our statistics on log-log paper and drew a line... And he published about that in a statistics journal not a physics journal but it's OK because the paper is in arXiv anyway.
  - nyssos 3y ago
    > the "hierarchy problem" and various allergies to fine tuning are really human preferences or things like The hierarchy problem is a real problem. The bare Higgs mass, for instance, might be a brute fact (but then again, it might not be), but the effective Higgs mass is some (likely very complicated) consequence of more fundamental physics at energy scales beyond the standard model. We just don't know what it is. But even if those more fundamental constants aren't explicable, they're definitely an explanation.
- codethief 3y ago
  > I didn't recognize the name but figured he was the guy who came up with M-theory As it so happens, he's also the guy behind this paper: "Searching for a Black Hole in the Outer Solar System", https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.14192 https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.14192 :-)
philipov 3y ago
Wow, really? You've never heard of Ed Witten?
- irrational 3y ago
  I have never read or heard the name in my 50+ years of life. I haven't googled him, so I still have no idea who he is.
  - nyssos 3y ago
    One of the most significant living physicists, and the only one to have won a Fields Medal (arguably the most prestigious award in mathematics). Known for Chern-Simons theory, contributions to AdS/CFT, and of course M-theory, among many other things. Physicists breaking out into mainstream culture for anything other than popsci is not really a thing that happens anymore, but he's extremely well-known among academics.
    - david-gpu 3y ago
      Has he predicted anything that has ever been observed? Because in my layperson's eyes that's the difference between math and theoretical physics.
      - whatshisface 3y ago
        Predicting a truly novel observation is rare, and has always been rare. Mostly what physicists do is clarify our understanding of things we've already observed, and extend techniques to handle cases that are more difficult to calculate than the cases that are presently considered tractable. For every one coulomb's law or socks-cling-to-stuff-after-drying effect there are a million papers about figuring out how to calculate the electrostatic fields of various configurations. The vast majority of what theoretical physicists do is "just math" except that unlike math, it's aimed at a problem posed by nature rather than a problem imagined up on the basis of what seems most interesting.

I didn't recognize the name but figured he was the guy who came up with M-theory, and sure enough, that's him. I believe the point here is achieving a legacy within the academy, not being known in pop culture. I think there's a lot of ambivalence about his influence, but it's definitely been large. His papers revealing how the whole superstring thing can be constructed in a way that doesn't blatantly contradict observed reality diverted at least a generation of theorists into the search for the holy grail of a theory of everything, but because we have no means of experiementally probing anything at the scales involved, it has also turned a generation of physicists into algebraic topologists largely divorced from experimental practice. You can think of him maybe like the Velvet Underground of physicists. They never achieved much popularity themselves, but virtually every rock band of the past 40 years that has gotten popular cites them as an influence, and many artists would rather have that as a legacy than popularity. Similarity, I think a lot of physicists would rather be well known and influential to other physicists rather than becoming the next Michio Kaku or someone else who shows up on television a lot.

PaulHoule 3y ago
In fundamental physics there are few very hard problems that are unambiguously real problems of which I would name: (1) what is dark matter? (2) what is the mass of the neutrino? (3) why is there so much matter in the universe and not so much antimatter? (4) Quite a few strange things about very high energy cosmic rays (Notably 2 is not "physics beyond the standard model", it is "a missing piece of the standard model") A lot of other questions might not really be "real" in various senses like: it's interesting to speculate that the interior of a quantum black hole is entirely unlike a classical black hole but you're not going to have anyone take a look and come back and tell us and we can just speculate if something kills you at the apparent horizon or not (so many bad ideas including the idea there is an "information paradox" come out believing the classical picture of the black hole interior which is probably just wrong), the "hierarchy problem" and various allergies to fine tuning are really human preferences or things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anomalous_magnetic_dipole_moment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anomalous_magnetic_dipole_mome... where between the experimental errors and the possibility that theorists aren't quite doing the math right and that the answers to 1-4 might account for any difference (I wouldn't be surprised it is if 1-4 have the same answer) The experiments for (1) and (2) are devilishly hard, there are accelerator observations of CP violations that are a line on (3), but the cosmic scale of (3) and (4) imposes its own difficulties. Really there are a lot of grad students chasing a moderate number of postdocs who hope to get one of very few permanent positions and out of it all there is a tiny amount of glory to be had. Condensed matter physics lacks the cosmic difficulties but it isn't dramatically better. How superconductivity works in cuprates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-temperature_superconductivity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-temperature_superconducti... is still quite mysterious after 35 years. I would name check Mark Newman as a standout in the "complex systems" area but the real accomplishment he made in my mind wasn't finding an explanation for "universal" power laws in complex systems but instead proving we didn't know what we were doing when we plotted our statistics on log-log paper and drew a line... And he published about that in a statistics journal not a physics journal but it's OK because the paper is in arXiv anyway.
- nyssos 3y ago
  > the "hierarchy problem" and various allergies to fine tuning are really human preferences or things like The hierarchy problem is a real problem. The bare Higgs mass, for instance, might be a brute fact (but then again, it might not be), but the effective Higgs mass is some (likely very complicated) consequence of more fundamental physics at energy scales beyond the standard model. We just don't know what it is. But even if those more fundamental constants aren't explicable, they're definitely an explanation.
codethief 3y ago
> I didn't recognize the name but figured he was the guy who came up with M-theory As it so happens, he's also the guy behind this paper: "Searching for a Black Hole in the Outer Solar System", https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.14192 https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.14192 :-)

philipov 3y ago

Wow, really? You've never heard of Ed Witten?

irrational 3y ago
I have never read or heard the name in my 50+ years of life. I haven't googled him, so I still have no idea who he is.
- nyssos 3y ago
  One of the most significant living physicists, and the only one to have won a Fields Medal (arguably the most prestigious award in mathematics). Known for Chern-Simons theory, contributions to AdS/CFT, and of course M-theory, among many other things. Physicists breaking out into mainstream culture for anything other than popsci is not really a thing that happens anymore, but he's extremely well-known among academics.
  - david-gpu 3y ago
    Has he predicted anything that has ever been observed? Because in my layperson's eyes that's the difference between math and theoretical physics.
    - whatshisface 3y ago
      Predicting a truly novel observation is rare, and has always been rare. Mostly what physicists do is clarify our understanding of things we've already observed, and extend techniques to handle cases that are more difficult to calculate than the cases that are presently considered tractable. For every one coulomb's law or socks-cling-to-stuff-after-drying effect there are a million papers about figuring out how to calculate the electrostatic fields of various configurations. The vast majority of what theoretical physicists do is "just math" except that unlike math, it's aimed at a problem posed by nature rather than a problem imagined up on the basis of what seems most interesting.