Quotes by Edward Witten

“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 plan...”

“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, either at Fermilab... or at CERN... Disc...”

“Just around the same time that the string picture was formed, asymptotic freedom was discovered and made possible, in QCD, a more precise and successful theory of the strong interactions. Yet there...”

“Even before string theory, especially as physics developed in the 20th century, it turned out that the equations that really work in describing nature with the most generality and the greatest simp...”

“It was found [in the 1970s], unexpectedly and without anyone really having a concept for it, that the rules of perturbation theory can be changed in a way that makes relativistic quantum gravity in...”

“Replacing particles by strings is a naive-sounding step, from which many other things follow. In fact, replacing Feynman graphs by Riemann surfaces has numerous consequences: 1. It eliminates the i...”

“We know a lot of things, but what we don't know is a lot more.”

“... one thing that's worth mentioning, though, it that apart from the dream of understanding physics at a deeper level involving gravity, work in string theory has been useful in shedding lights on...”

“The past decade has seen a remarkable renaissance in the interaction between mathematics and physics. This has been mainly due to the increasingly sophisticated mathematical models employed by elem...”

“For example, Ed Witten recently derived a formula for Donaldson invariants on Kähler manifolds using a twisted version of supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory in four dimensions. His argument depends o...”

“In the spring of 1985 Ed Witten, one of the most brilliant of young physicists at Princeton University, announced that he would give a talk. ...it was clear that this talk would be an extraordinary...”

“Witten's excitement arose from the fact that the theory passed several crucial tests which other theories had failed. To have found a theory of the universe which is not mathematically self-contrad...”

“Our Witten, which art in Princeton,Hallowed be thy name.Thy Nobel come,Thy will be done,In CERN as it is in the US.Give us this day our daily string,And forgive us our theory,As we forgive those wh...”

“Enter superstring theory. The concept that particles are really tiny strings dates from the 1960s, but it took on wings in 1974, when John Schwarz... and Joel Scherk... came to terms with what had ...”

“In the high carrels of theoretical physics, where intelligence is taken for granted, Witten is regarded as preternaturally, almost forbiddingly, smart. ...he wears the habitual small smile of the t...”

“The Theory of Everything, if you dare be bold,Might be something more than a string orbifold.While some of your leaders have got old and sclerotic,Not to be trusted alone with things heterotic,Plea...”