Edward Witten quotes

Edward Witten is an American mathematician and theoretical physicist, renowned for his groundbreaking work in string theory and related fields. His research has deeply influenced both mathematics and physics, bridging the gap between the two disciplines. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential scientists in modern theoretical physics. Here are 45 of his quotes:

One of the basic things about a string is that it can vibrate in many different shapes or forms, which gives music its beauty.

Edward Witten

There was a long history of speculation that in quantum gravity, unlike Einstein's classical theory, it might be possible for the topology of spacetime to change.

Edward Witten

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.

Edward Witten

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 take 20th- or perhaps 21st-century equipment to explore.

Edward Witten

As of now, string theorists have no explanation of why there are three large dimensions as well as time, and the other dimensions are microscopic. Proposals about that have been all over the map.

Edward Witten

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.

Edward Witten

As far as extra dimensions are concerned, very tiny extra dimensions wouldn't be perceived in everyday life, just as atoms aren't: we see many atoms together but we don't see atoms individually.

Edward Witten

The theory has to be interpreted that extra dimensions beyond the ordinary four dimensions the three spatial dimensions plus time are sufficiently small that they haven't been observed yet.

Edward Witten

Quantum mechanics brought an unexpected fuzziness into physics because of quantum uncertainty, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.

Edward Witten

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 the past.

Edward Witten

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... Discovery of supersymmetry would be one of the real milestones in physics, made even more exciting by its close links to still more ambitious theoretical ideas. Indeed, supersymmetry is one of the basic requirements of "string theory," which is the framework in which theoretical physicists have had some success in unifying gravity with the rest of the elementary particle forces. Discovery of supersymmetry would would certainly give string theory an enormous boost.

Edward Witten

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.

Edward Witten

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 greatest theoretical insights ever.

Edward Witten

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 is that physics is about concepts, wanting to understand the concepts, the principles by which the world works.

Edward Witten

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 inevitable rather than impossible. The change is made by replacing point particles by strings. Then Feynman graphs are replaced by Riemann surfaces, which are smooth - unlike the graphs, which have singularities at interaction vertices. The Riemann surfaces can degenerate to graphs in many different ways. In field theory, the interactions occur at the vertices of a Feynman graph. By contrast, in string theory, the interaction is encoded globally, in the topology of a Riemann surface, any small piece of which is like any other. This is reminiscent of how non-linearities are encoded globally in twistor theory.

Edward Witten

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

Edward Witten

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.

Edward Witten

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 harmony.

Edward Witten

In Einstein's general relativity the structure of space can change but not its topology. Topology is the property of something that doesn't change when you bend it or stretch it as long as you don't break anything.

Edward Witten

So when you ask me how string theory might be tested, I can tell you what's likely to happen at accelerators or some parts of the theory that are likely to be tested.

Edward Witten

I wouldn't have thought that a wrong theory should lead us to understand better the ordinary quantum field theories or to have new insights about the quantum states of black holes.

Edward Witten

It's indeed surprising that replacing the elementary particle with a string leads to such a big change in things. I'm tempted to say that it has to do with the fuzziness it introduces.

Edward Witten