ed witten

ed witten and m-theory

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Howto & Style

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• physics

[timetraveler2006]

and you remind me of the kid who ended up bagging his groceries when the two of you grew up.

[imoran21]

you guys are stupid.. its all an invisible man in the sky that controls everything

[SuperDogbrown]

some sweet info here

[xatzin2004]

@astroboomboy good point

[astroboomboy]

@myrtlebox Feynman was truly a great man, and maybe you are right that he did seem very disinterested in anything that was non-technical. The only thing I have against Feynman and the scientists that followed in his thinking was his contempt for social sciences, psychology and the arts. I agree they are not "real" objective science, but I think they are a necessary part of what makes our society function as it gives us deeper knowledge about many things. Good luck to you too!

[myrtlebox]

@astroboomboy Agree. One of my heroes (Feynman) is purported to have a 125 IQ. His relative disinterest in the non-technical probably account for that. But I do think CURIOSITY and INDUSTRY are far more important than sheer processing power. Feynman had extraordinary doses of both.

Good luck with your work - be curious and industrious ;-)

[astroboomboy]

@myrtlebox There are also those with a very high IQ, and extremely talented computational and math solving skills, but end up not having one creative/new idea, which has made me really think that IQ and quantitative skills like memorizing and being able to do math in your head is not really that amazing, and it is very easy processes as fairly standard computers can do all these things. It is the creative and analytical part I think that is the most important, and the part most overlooked.

[astroboomboy]

@myrtlebox Yeah, I think you really have to sacrifice a whole lot to be among the top, I just started with math and I'm 28, and I'll be pursuing a degree in robotics now. I have an MA in Chinese Philosophy, but I have been regretting the fact that I got involved in that, as science is really what interests me. But I would not take an IQ test very seriously, in fact there where many scientists who did quite bad on IQ tests, and even some who where terrible in solving equations.

[myrtlebox]

@astroboomboy There is no doubt that you are correct. You just cannot dominate this field without a minimum 170 IQ and spending every spare minute devoted to learning the techniques and thinking about extensions to existing ideas and generating new ones.

I would say nearly 100% of his predecessors were involved in math/science from an extremely early age. For Ed, it was kind of stumbling into it via random walk.

We're all just happy and thankful that he found his home!

[astroboomboy]

@Kaeralho Feynman did some discoveries, but not any fundamental discoveries that changed the view we have of the natural world (I mean, don't get me wrong, his theories where paramount, but not fundamentally changing the field). If string theory is proven, which today seems unlikely, it will change what we know about nature in a fundamental way, like what Einstein did.

[astroboomboy]

@myrtlebox He started his bachelors in history at 17, and finished at 20. Then he also wrote and worked in a political party or something I think, hehe, but after dropping out of graduate studies in economics he got enrolled in math, I guess he just showed that he knew math at an advanced level. He then did his MA and phd twice as fast as normal, I think something like that. So I think he just put every single hour of his life into it!

[myrtlebox]

But he started his career with a major in History and linguistics and then a try at economics for a semester. Can anyone explain that to me?

How can someone be the best in the world at something he didn't even realize he was good at or interested in until relatively late in his life?

Those facts alone are as mind-boggling to me as his consolidation of string theories to M-theory