Quotes by Edward Witten

“Away from the safety of your home, the universe was not made for your convenience.”

“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.”

“We have one real candidate for changing the rules; this is string theory. In string theory the one-dimensional trajectory of a particle in spacetime is replaced by a two-dimensional orbit of a stri...”

“As for the forces, electromagnetism and gravity we experience in everyday life. But the weak and strong forces are beyond our ordinary experience. So in physics, lots of the basic building blocks t...”

“I don't care about movies. I tend to play badminton once a week.”

“But the beauty of Einstein's equations, for example, is just as real to anyone who's experienced it as the beauty of music. We've learned in the 20th century that the equations that work have inner...”

“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.”

“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 know...”

“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. The essence of it...”

“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 foundatio...”

“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 we have a rich conceptual framework with relativity...”

“String theory at its finest is, or should be, a new branch of geometry. ...I, myself, believe rather strongly that the proper setting for string theory will prove to be a suitable elaboration of th...”

“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 electro...”

“I would expect that a proper elucidation of what string theory really is all about would involve a revolution in our concepts of the basic laws of physics - similar in scope to any that occurred in...”

“It's been said that string theory is part of the physics of the twenty-first century that fell by chance into the twentieth century. That's a remark that was made by a leading physicist about fifte...”

“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 postprediction, 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 gr...”

“Good wrong ideas are extremely scarce... and good wrong ideas that even remotely rival the majesty of string theory have never been seen.”