Ed Witten: Difference between revisions
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|content=One of the greatest minds of our time, Michael Atiyah, eulogized by his true still-active peers including Witten & Donaldson. With all the confusion/hype of this moment in time, it's worth reminding ourselves of what achievement sounds like w/o inflation: | |||
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Revision as of 23:00, 25 November 2025
2009
Ed Witten has no Nobel Prize.
Now tell me again how this era's physics just feels different because we are too close to it.
So @orzelc the Quetion is: "Is this likely the first era of fundamental physics that could produce a 55+ Witten nonlaureate?"
My friend @orzelc asks: "do you consider Wheeler to be in Witten's class?" Short answer is no. But I never went 1-1 with a young Wheeler.
The nonphysicist disagrees w/ @orzelc. Wheeler lived through the whole build up of the Standard Model. Ed would have pounced repeatedly.
To @orzelc: in your life you'll see Paris and the Taj Mahal. Make sure you meet all the great minds. Go see Ed. He's part human.
And what about Jim Simons? Other than Chern Simons he did amazing stuff. Wu-Yang ...and that holonomy theorem of Berger was first rate.
Anyone else appreciate that Jim Simons redoing Berger's list of holonomy groups to prove intrinsic sphere transitivity? An artist's theorem.
Someone else I admire: Dan Freed at Austin. Dan never gets all the credit he deserves. Every paper nails some loose end for the community.
In Econ. Krugman is the master chef who can start with deadly pufferfish and dependably prepare elegant fugu thats safe to eat.
2010
Telomeres, Scientist Shortages, Seiberg Witten, Inflation (CPI), E8 TOE, Immigration, Neoclassical tastes all now have fictional narratives.
Open science, non-castrated science journalism, gonzo science, twitter, etc. are our best hedge about having science destroyed by narrative.
2011
Q: When will Ed Witten tell us what the M in M-Theory stands for? A: Mañana, amigo. Mañana....
Ed Witten turned 60 today. I closed my eyes & remembered him in his mid 30s with the excitement of string unification around the next bend.
Greenspan failed. Witten failed. Obama failed. McGwire failed. Goldman failed. Spitzer failed. AIG failed. Assange Failed. You? Lookin good!
2016
Ed Witten sums up his extraordinary career in physics. Ed is the most terrifying intellect I have ever encountered.
https://www.ias.edu/sns/ckfinder/userfiles/files/ComemorativeLecturePopular(1).pdf
2017
If I had but one paragraph to recommend as the most important in all of literature, it might well be this one. However, as you might imagine, unpacking it, could take up your entire life.
[There is a 'flaw' in the paragraph. The word 'gauge' should be replaced by 'structure'.]
1/ Interesting esoteric features:
i) refers to Einstein Field Equation for the gravitational force. (only implicitly).
ii) refers to the Yang-Mills-Maxwell Equation for the other forces (only implicitly).
iii) refers to the Dirac Equation for matter (yet again, only implicitly).
2/ The Quantum (e.g. quantum mechanics, quantum field theory, quantum measurement, etc...) is relegated to a *secondary* status below the key geometric insights. This was likely done very subtly when the paper was given in the 1980s, as it was, and remains, a revolutionary idea.
End/ An interpretation is that Witten, the greatest living mathematical physicist, was indicating to us that it was only these *abstractions* that were likely to survive, while the instantiations (i.e. the exact equations we still use) would likely perish.
A msg never recieived.
2018
1/ "Theories of Everything": A Taxonomy.
It is often said that "Theories-of-Everything are a dime a dozen" or that "All theoretical physicists worth their salt have several in a drawer." So far as I can tell, this is simply untrue. We've barely ever, if at all, seen candidates.
2/ The Escher Lithograph used in the first tweet points to the core of why TOEs are rare. A candidate TOE has to have some quality of "a fire that lights itself", which is difficult to think about beyond the equations that would instantiate it. Hence very few such theories exist.
3/ I'm going to lean on the following dictionary of analogies:
Physical Paper = Void Pictured Canvas = Manifold and/or Einsteinian Spacetime Ink=Matter & non-gravitational force fields Pencils = Pre-Conscious Lego (e.g. amino acids) Hands = Consciousness Paradox = Self-awareness
4/ In my taxonomy, Type I TOEs are our least ambitious but they best match our state of the world. They are distinguished by two *separate* sources of origin: one for the Canvas (General Relativity or Witten's point i) ) & one for the Ink (Standard Model or Witten's point ii) ).
5 Type II TOE's are more ambitious & seek to derive the Ink from the choice of a mathematically distinguished Canvas that is anything but blank. My arch-nemesis @garrettlisi's theory is Type II. E8 is his 248 dimensional canvas. The intricacy is there, but doesn't quite match up.
6/ In Type III TOEs the ink is to be derived from canvas, but the canvas is essentially blank; it simply permits mathematics to happen (e.g. calculus and linear algebra). In such theories the ink has to be bootstrapped into existence. My lectures on Geometric Unity were Type III.
7/ Type IV TOE's try to change the question from Einstein's "Unified Field Theory." In String Thy, "Quantizing Gravity" became substituted for "Unified Field." For this crowd, many are now betting that the canvas & ink are both *emergent* from some deeper fundamental quantum thy.
8/ Type V TOEs are of a type I've never been able to fully contemplate; they are without boundaries or origins. There is no "Why is there something rather than nothing" within them. That which is not forbidden is compelled into existence. Void creates canvas & canvas begets void.
9/ Type VI TOEs begin with the hands. Religions are of this type. I pass over this in silence as they aren't scientific.
I will leave open higher types, but I've really only seen attempts at I-IV & I wouldn't call String-Thy/M-Thy a full TOE try since events of the last 15 yrs.
10/ I believe fundamental physics is stalled out because we are finally at the doorstep of a TOE and we haven't really bothered to think about what that would actually mean because we've never been here before. A final step need not look like any previous one. In fact, it cannot.
END/ My bet is on Type III for a reason:
Type I is not unified.
Type II is possible, but appears to be unworkable in details.
Type IV appears to lack sufficient guidance from Quantum theory to actually 'ship' despite consuming resources for yrs.
Types V & VI lack any progress.
2019
One of the greatest minds of our time, Michael Atiyah, eulogized by his true still-active peers including Witten & Donaldson. With all the confusion/hype of this moment in time, it's worth reminding ourselves of what achievement sounds like w/o inflation:
2020
2021
Isadore Singer & Raoul Bott worked in almost exactly the same area. They collaborated with exactly the same people. They worked in adjacent zip codes (02138 vs 02139). They both had claims to the "greatest topological theorem" of the 20th century.
They never co-authored a paper.
I've known only three minds personally who I'm convinced will be discussed 1000 years from now if humans survive: James Watson, Raoul Bott and Isadore Singer (I met Atiyah & Witten but did not know them).
Is & Raoul however both collaborated on my rescue in Graduate school.
Perhaps with both of these giants now gone it is time to tell my story. I'm not sure. I have never told it publicly in full. But they both are heroic men beyond being great minds.
Had they surmounted their personal difficulties their collaborations could have changed the world.
They worked down the same street. I was at times a ping pong ball they sent back & forth between Building 2 at MIT & Harvard Science Center rm 508 (I think) along a 45 minute walk. I very much respected that they chose not to air any difficulties. They had respect for each other.
One reason I largely kept quiet about my story is respect for both men. They both defended and believed in the system. But, in part they believed in it BECAUSE they were so powerful that they could act as an underground railroad when that system failed:
So, in part, I'm their collaboration. Raoul was not my advisor. He had no real idea what I was doing. But he was far more than that. Is was my shtarker. My ace in the hole. They worked as a team to help me; their failure to talk directly was the main clue I had of anything amiss.
Lastly, there is the matter of my wedding. Is came to our event but I didn't invite Raoul. I did not understand what he had done for me. It is one of the biggest mistakes of my life. When the internet tries to insist to me that I am his student, I want to tell them what happend.
The truth is that I would have been proud to be the student of Raoul Bott. I would have a storied lineage to claim.
The truth is Raoul gave me his name for a self-advised thesis. And like a fool I resented it. Yet how much greater is the man who lends his last name to a Bastard.
In any event. I miss Is very much, but never expected to see him again. And I'm wrestling w the idea that I'm now free to tell my own story after 25yrs of saying very little in public. One of the reasons I don't take kindly to internet warfare is that I have large debts to pay.
The more I subject myself to mindless politics, catfighting, shadowbanning & trolling, the harder it is to fight for others/myself and to pay the debts to the giants who rescued me along my way. I don't know how I'd have done w/o them.
But I needed to grow this voice to do it.
Lastly, I used to have a relationship to a very different @nytimes. Thus when I read Is' obituarty I was shocked to see @julierehmeyer's beautiful tribute including my own quotes on Is. It made me sad to think about how much has been lost. Sadly, those quotes came from long ago.
If you haven't read her piece, I think it is quite moving even though it is no more than a sketch. End.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/12/science/isadore-singer-dead.html
[Not to be crass: but I can usually tell within the 1st minute what is happening to the throttling of my tweets: this is not being widely seen. I'm trying to say something meaningful about a departed friend @jack. Could you please take a personal interest & stop the throttling?!]
2022
It really depends. Being totally honest:
âString Theoryâ has done a *tremendous* amount of good while âString Maximalismâ has done even more harm.
If the String Theorists who led the movement were to undo some of the damage by admitting what happened, itâd be a major positive.
Here is where I respectfully disagree with my colleague @skdh. You canât âget rid of string theoryâ. String-like objects are natural and have an unbelievably rich and beautiful interlocking mathematics. The beguiling beauty isnât the problem in my opinion. Beauty is the excuse.
The problem is that string theory on its own has taken the last 40years to PROVE it doesnât work as a stand alone path by gobbling up mind share, students, resources and (to be fair) most of the most brilliant brains. So much that no one dares say the full extent of the disaster.
During that time String Theory diverted the entire field into a magical never-land of âtoy physicsâ. Models that arenât in any way real. You now have âparticle physicistsâ at the end of their careers who have never worked with anything like a particle and canât remember them.
So, hereâs my analysis. In a world where David Gross, Ed Witten, Lenny Susskind, Cumrun Vafa, Michio Kaku had a public Come To Jesus moment where they admitted the disaster in front of the community faithful, Iâd be up for having ST as a major theory. But without that Iâm unsure.
The damage to the culture of High Energy Physics is more severe than the damage done by Geoffery Chew in a different era. And here I support @skdh, Peter Woit, Lee Smolin etc. These are brave people who paid with abuse to communicate that physics was diverting into pure fantasy.
So to sum up:
String Theory deserves to be a major branch. But it has already mostly given up on the â80s promises/lies it told us to gobble up all the resources of the community (brains, mind share, $$$). That was a crime which may prove fatal to our being able to do physics.
But it is also so thoroughly investigated and badly behaved relative to scientific norms that it deserved to be shrunk. And that happened to a large extent already. The most important thing to realize is that physics is still about the physical world. Not Calabi Yau. Not AdS/CFT.
And we need our brilliant failed string theorists to admit the disaster within a scientific paradigm.
Science is a culture. Perhaps the most fragile one. It wonât survive this suspension of collegiality, decency and self-critical behavior. We need to go back to real physics. đ
@martinmbauer String theory was a giant percentage of a tiny priesthood. That was the same tiny priesthood that brought us Thermo Nuclear devices. And if you want to pay for me to research the numbers Iâm willing to hire somebody to put together the data after 1984. Itâs not usually contested.
@DontsitDJ @martinmbauer I wasnât aware of it like that. I think he disagrees with me and has a bit of an edge. But maybe I missed a tweet or two. I havenât seen much interaction and he has written some things I liked.
@DontsitDJ @martinmbauer I love a good critique. Itâs hard to find. Most people out here develop a side hustle in interpersonal drama. I try not to.
@martinmbauer I donât know which version of âThe Fieldâ you mean.
Physics in total? Is a large field.
Beyond the standard model theory? Is a small field. Tiny. But hugely consequential. And the percentage and effect wasnât small. Do you really dispute this??? Look at the IAS professors.
@martinmbauer Seiberg/Witten/Dijkgraaf/Maldacena
All string folks.
Maybe get a string theorist to admit this to you. Brian Greene likely wouldnât disagree with me.
2023
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