Words matter. These are the best Edward Witten Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Technically you need the extra dimensions. At first people didn’t like them too much, but they’ve got a big benefit, which is that the ability of string theory to describe all the elementary particles and their forces along with gravity depends on using the extra dimensions.
I’m actually, for the most part, a complete agnostic politically.
I have a tendency, more than most other physicists, to try to figure out everything all at once, before I publish. And even to try to figure out everything in my head, without pencil and paper.
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.
If I take the theory as we have it now, literally, I would conclude that extra dimensions really exist. They’re part of nature. We don’t really know how big they are yet, but we hope to explore that in various ways.
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.
Spreading out the particle into a string is a step in the direction of making everything we’re familiar with fuzzy. You enter a completely new world where things aren’t at all what you’re used to.
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.
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.
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.
Having those extra dimensions and therefore many ways the string can vibrate in many different directions turns out to be the key to being able to describe all the particles that we see.
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.
If you are a researcher, you are trying to figure out what the question is as well as what the answer is.
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 simplicity are very elegant and subtle.
On the other hand, we don’t understand the theory too completely, and because of this fuzziness of spacetime, the very concept of spacetime and spacetime dimensions isn’t precisely defined.
One of the basic things about a string is that it can vibrate in many different shapes or forms, which gives music its beauty.
It’s an exaggeration to say that I came up with M-theory.
I don’t care about movies. I tend to play badminton once a week.
