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Edward Witten: Pioneering Theoretician
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12668 |
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NATURAL SCIENCE
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6 / 1987 |
3,389 Words |
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A. K. Finkbeiner
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Edward Witten is a phenomenon. He is a 35-year-old physicist, already famous for his work on an abstruse theory - part physics, part mathematics - that physicists modestly call a Theory of Everything. His first job was at Princeton University, which hired him in 1980 as a full professor. Between 1982 and 1986, he won five coveted prizes, including the National Science Foundation's Alan T. Waterman Award for outstanding young researcher and the MacArthur Foundation Prize, the so-called genius prize, a five-year award given outright to people of exceptional talent.
"He's not just another smart guy," said Pierre Ramond, physicist at the University of Florida at Gainesville who has done fundamental work on a Theory of Everything. "He's off-scale smart. He has good taste, a good 'nose,' the knack for asking the important questions." In addition, said Ramond, "Witten can talk to mathematicians as an equal. Usually mathematicians call physicists plumbers." What is particularly impressive about Witten, according to jack Morava, mathematician at Johns Hopkins University who helped develop the math Witten says he aspires to use, is his ability "to go right to the heart of the math, and see where it fits with the right physics. Mathematicians don't use intuition as much as physicists do. Witten uses his physicist's intuition to do things with math that look like wild leaps. Someone had to get to twenty-first-century math first, and he was the one to do it and apply it to physics." Says Ramond, "He's just a superstar."
Witten was born in Baltimore in 1951, the son of Lorraine Wollach Witten and Louis Witten, a gravitational physicist now at the University of Cincinnati. Witten graduated from Brandeis University in 1971 with a B.A. in physics, from Princeton in 1976 with a Ph.D in physics. For the next year, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard, and from 1977 to 1980, a member of the Harvard Society of Fellows, an honorary society that allows Harvard's top post-doctoral students to continue their research before undertaking the rigors of job hunting.
While at Harvard, Witten had become interested in the mathematics of higher dimensions, a kind of geometry that describes a universe with 26, or 284, or any other number of dimensions. Mathematicians study higher-dimensional geometry not for any practical reason, but says Morava, "because it is there, and somehow things are simpler in more dimensions." Witten was studying it because he suspected that it was involved in what he calls "the wonderful and inaccessible problem of reconciling quantum theory and gravity."
In fact, reconciling quantum theory and gravity has preoccupied a fraction of the physics community for some time: Quantum theory and gravity together form the basis of modern physics but are stated in mutually incomprehensible languages. Quantum theory, backed by years of rigorous experiment, describes matter at the level of elementary particles. Quantum theory, or more precisely its offshoot called quantum field theory, says that the behavior of matter is most fundamentally particles of one set affecting each other by exchanging particles of another set. The theory of gravity, also called the theory of general relativity and similarly backed by experiment, talks only about macroscopic objects. Large objects attract each other because they curve space-time around them: Newton's apple simply rolled down the deep, curved well in space-time made by the earth. Now, if Witten and his colleagues are right, the two theories can be put in the same language into
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