What works did Edward Witten do? 

PROPAGANDA AND LIES! PAPERS HE PUBLISHED? AWARDS HE WON? NONE! GOVERNMENT CUCK THAT PUSHING LIES AND YOUR TRASHTO HELP!!

Well yeah his recent work wasn't covered. He has been doing a lot of work in using quantum information theory in the problems of quantum gravity and QFT in curved spacetime.

yeah but can he rip through the same problems in regular space? hyperspace? anti-de sitter space and outer-space..?! Yeah, didn't think so.

The crazy thing is that there's zero experimental evidence for any of these theories. It isn't as if one could go to CERN or Fermilab and test them. These guys are excellent mathematicians, but they're so "lost in math" that their ideas have little relevance to the real world. String theory will sooner or later be seen as a fad, filled with lots of esoteric math that most rank-and-file physicists need not bother with

@@TheLuminousOne Bro you won't reach Witten's level of understanding of physics and mathematics in an infinite lifetime....

​@fernandocabrera4599 neither will you. Fan boy. The guy asked a question albeit with a taunt, it's not a wrong thing to ask. Fan boy in you got agitated. I guess morons like you elevate people to a level where questioning them becomes a crime. String theory is still nowhere to be viable but you keep dik riding him cause you are in love with him. How do people like you get into science.

And soak in pools in exclusive skiing resorts.

Thanks for your kind feedback, and I am happy to know that my work helped you. I am changing my content to a certain extent now, and I hope that this works. Let's see. Thanks for watching.

A lot of Hype for a man who has produced nothing that can be measured nor Proven. The useless String Theory has brought Progress in Physics to a standstill! Equal to or better than Einstein, you must be kidding! Not even close!

@@mahoneytechnologies657Yes, but why here though?

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Only you?!. 😂

Thanks. I hope you will like other content on this channel as well.

I think he retired due to an unspoken rule at Institute for Advanced Study to retire at a certain age to make room for the younger generation. You don't want IAS clogged with a bunch of 90+ year olds who refuse to retire.

Thanks

Witten is only mathematical games of which the link to reality is still a promise. That's all...

@@elputas You try to sound smart but deep down you know you're a dumb person.

Thanks for your feedback, and thanks for watching.

Thanks for your feedback, and thanks for watching. Well, that's a nice idea, and I was also kind of thinking about it. I will link all the papers mentioned in this video soon in the description.

@@Phymaths Thank you! I'm following up by watching a video in the _Closer to Truth_ series of an interview with Ed, and trying to understand how the five "different" string theories of the 80s was unified in the 90's, based on the "assumption" that the five different string theories were actually all parts of same "theory" but were the result of studying it in different regions of it's "parameter space"- ? Still trying to get my head around it, especially in the context of Stephen Wolfram's "Rulial Spaces", as well. Cheers.

Thanks for your feedback and thanks for watching.

Glad it was helpful! Thanks for watching

Thanks

You are welcome. Thanks for watching.

Thanks.

Thanks for your feedback. Well, as a graduate student, you normally work on minor problems which are rarely attacked by big physicists. As you learn more, you attack bigger problems. Witten for example hasn't worked on every problem. There are whole areas, where Witten has negligible contributions. Moreover, if Witten or some other big physicist works on something, it needs to be checked by the community. In addition, if Witten is working on a problem, it is possible that he might be making a mistake there and someone else working on that problem might be helpful for his work. In fact, he was making a small mistake while working on orbifolds and the help that he got was because of the work of Aspinwall. For the source of this anecdote, see his interview with H. Ooguir (linked below). Thanks. Link: www.ams.org/notices/201505/rnoti-p491.pdf

You are welcome.

Thanks for pointing it out. I had to cut out some brilliant works of Witten as there are so many of them. For example, Witten genus, Witten index, and Gromov Witten invariants are some of the left out works. Thanks again for pointing out this work that isn't mentioned in the video, and thanks for watching.

The elegant universe show one of the best things I ever came accross

If string theory were to ever make a testable prediction that were confirmed, Witten would be first in line for the Nobel Prize.

@@ultimateman55 they should make a amandament to their rule to give novel prize to deceased person cause it will take a damn long time lol

@@Thomas-cat You're only saying that because it's true!

@@ultimateman55 just some food for thought across all parallel universes and every civilisation that happened or will happen, The many people who manage to make important contribution to the area of string thoery will never get to see the the fruits of thier talents cause the time you make those contributions is far behind the time that they can make any feasible experiment to conduct in the future. And in this universe that person is called edward witten. its very sad thing i guess

​@@Thomas-cat I doubt he would view it as sad. He compared the richness of string theory to the harmonics of music. One might could say he has heard the symphony of the universe better than anyone else.

And get a Fields medal for doing it ✌️

Thanks.

Thanks for your feedback and thanks for watching.

@@Phymaths The thanks goes all to you for making such a good piece which does the field and man himself great justice. I think what made this piece so good is that you yourself are a theoretical physicist and as such pulled no punches in describing his works as well as those of others on which he built and or excelled at. It's the most sober and professional piece I've seen on his works and accomplishments thus far -

Thanks for your kind words. ✌️

Yes

Well, yes we can get all the particles from strings and actually more but they are too massive to be found at low energies. We still to get the standard model with all the right properties in string theory. There are too many vaccua to be studied in strings.

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My pleasure

My Pleasure. Thanks for watching.

Use this link: www.proquest.com/openview/133acd9a52c8912141ccc02ca06c86d6/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=18750&diss=y

Thanks a lot. I am glad that you liked it.

Thanks for your feedback, and thanks for watching 👍

Ok, that's interesting. Now I can't unsee it 😅

That one was great !!!

From now on he is my favorite sci-fi writer too hahaha

Super disrespectful considering your lifes work and Edwards

😂

Bet you can’t even solve a simple integral

Thanks

Thanks for your feedback and thanks for watching. I would recommend this fantastic video by Quanta magazine for an introduction to the Langlands program ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-_bJeKUosqoY.htmlsi=bfYTOPZMpOWrvSbX

See this: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langlands_program In representation theory and algebraic number theory, the Langlands program is a web of far-reaching and influential conjectures about connections between number theory and geometry. Proposed by Robert Langlands (1967, 1970), it seeks to relate Galois groups in algebraic number theory to automorphic forms and representation theory of algebraic groups over local fields and adeles. Widely seen as the single biggest project in modern mathematical research, the Langlands program has been described by Edward Frenkel as "a kind of grand unified theory of mathematics."[1]

Correlation isn't causation dude 😅

@@Phymaths Damn. Looks like mathematical statistics may be out of my reach for sure.

Written and I are both humans. Maybe it’s possible for me to become as smart as the doc

Thanks

You do not know what Dirac and Feynmann and the others did either.

Actually M-Theory is Super-Simple! We start from Superpoint where "Super" means Z2 grading separating all coordinates of underlying vector spaces in symmetrical monoidal categories to "bosonic" and "fermionic". After superpoint we introduce the notion of Super-Lie-Algebras in which we model the Super-Spheres and Super-Manifolds (Calabi-Yau). Then by lifting Superpoint through 4 Hopf-Fibrations using Cayley-Dickson construction we obtain IIB ⟶ ℝ9,1|16+16 ⟵ ℝ9,1|16 ⟶ ℝ9,1|16+1̅6̅ ⟵ IIA. Maximal invariant of central extension of Minkowski of IIA type ℝ9,1|16+16 is ℝ^10,1|32 - The 11-dimentional М-theory with 32 fermionic coordinates. The main tools for studying M-Theory are: Chevalier-Eilenberg cohomologies, BRST cohomologies, de Rham cohomologies.

This is mainly a consequence of teaching quantum mechanics and field theory very poorly to physics students, in terms that exclude the natural geometrical meaning. Witten's main contributions (even ignoring strings) is about exploiting these geometric structures for physical results. His positivity of energy in gravity paper is a good example. Similarly, you can go after other people in this video - Michael Atiyah coined Dirac operators and generalized Dirac's gamma matrix derivative operator to manifolds.

@@tonpa What you describe here are th perturbative limits of M-theory. The full non-perturbative framework is not clear at all. It is believed that this is only seen by twisted cohomotopy.

@@youtubesucks1885 You'll just need to prove theorems carefully in mechanical way of type checkers like Modal HoTT and Linear HoTT. Then you'll see clarity!

My pleasure. Thanks for watching.

Well all of Witten's students are good so I chose five of them that I could show in a screen (some personal bias also slipped in there as the five people that I chose were the five people that I mostly read and listen about). As far as Vasily Pestun is concerned, he and the other students I missed are all brillian people in their fields.

Where did u read this particular anecdote? If u cud share pls

@@rubbersidedown7992 I didn't read it. I heared it from this channel and I trust Salem very much

​@rubbersidedown7992 well I mentioned this anecdote in this video at 3:52. The source of this information is Witten's 2021 interview whose link is as follows www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral-histories/46968

@@Phymaths thnq.

@@rubbersidedown7992 My pleasure

Thanks for your feedback. I'm glad that you liked it. Thanks for watching.

Thanks ✌️

My Pleasure. Thanks for watching.

I am not sure. I think at Princeton and many other schools (at least at that time), you didn't need to be a physics major to do a Ph.D. in physics. However, he had other courses in his undergrad but his major was history as you already mentioned.

Anyone that can comprehend calculus at 11 years old has a lifetime admission ticket to any college they choose. Many students acquire academic scholarships. Edward Witten stopped professors in their tracks.

Look who his father was and you'll understand. While he's incredibly intelligent, it was pure nepo baby shit

Yes. Robert Langlands started that in a letter to Andre Weil. He is totally awesome I agree

Thanks for watching and for your feedback.

He wasn't born in Eastern Europe. He was born in Baltimore. His ancestors were from Eastern Europe.

I am doing my bsc honours in physics now and undergrad was not as bad as i thought just work hard everyday and you will be fine. Don't give up and move on if you are stuck on a subject just work through it, watching videos on youtube really helps. Also i found reading different textbooks for different explanations on the same subject works. There will be tuff times just grind through them man and enjoy.

Thanks and good luck. Just build solid foundation in the basic courses before going to advanced topics. Moreover, don't underestimate the importance of practice problems in your learning.

@@Phymaths thank you. I have subscribed to your channel although most of the content is beyond my level currently 😅

@@jannien4129 thank you and good luck 🤞

Thanks for subscribing. It is ok... it can give you a great piece of joy when eventually you are able to understand things that you once saw but couldn't understand. There is a picture of Witten with a chalkboard at the back and some formulas on it. I couldn't understand them when I saw it in 2015. When I could finally understand them, it was a great pleasure. Good luck.

I don't know what your background is, but a small explanation is like this... For strings (in all goos string theories), if you calculate the spectrum of the massless states, there is one field there that has two spacetime indices and is symmetric between the exchange of these indices. These things imply that this state is a manifestation of a field that is a symmetric tensor field, which is nothing but the graviton field.

​@@Phymathsare string theorists going to make 1 practical experiment to prove any of this or are their "beautiful" theories still going to remain in the same proving stage as "god created it"

In addition to what @Phymaths replied: First, a good starting point may be the talk "What every physicist should know about string theory" by Witten himself. You can find it on RU-vid. Second: As @Phymaths said, if you analyze how a relativistic string would behave quantum mechanically, you find that there are vibrational states that have the right properties to be the graviton. However, that alone does not explain how these graviton-like particles can "yield gravity", as you put it, and thereby be actual gravitons. The key is something called the "state-operator correspondence" in conformal field theories (CFTs). Let me try to explain at a high level why and what this means (I don't really understand it on a deep level myself, yet): 1) You first analyze the movement of a string through a background spacetime. You find that the spacetime coordinates describing the movement of the string behave (when viewed as functions on the "world sheet" of the string; think of it like a tube swept out by the string as it moves) like quantum fields with some very special (conformal) symmetries, i.e. like a CFT. 2) This CFT has a 1-to-1 correspondence between quantum states of the theory and local operators in the theory. What does this mean in this context? The different *states* of the CFT correspond to different particles (and polarizations) in the spacetime background. The *local operators* can be thought of as local changes of the laws of motion of the string, for example due to *local deformations of the spacetime*, i.e. gravity! If two strings join, that is one string worldsheet connects to the other, the string that is joining has a state on it, i.e. it is an incoming particle (e.g. a graviton). The state-operator correspondence of the CFT now tells us, that for every kind of incoming particle (state), there is a local operator on the "receiving string" that captures the effect of this string joining, and vice versa. This means that for the effects of gravity, i.e. of local deformations of the spacetime, there are also matching incoming states *that will have exactly this effect on the string that the deformation of the spacetime has*, i.e. these incoming strings "can do gravity" (among other things)!

@@EdwinSteiner khm, when can we expect 1 experimental proof or a proven prediction. I mean it's been 50 years.......

@@Tonixxy Well, neither physics nor the universe care about our human impatience and limited lifetime, unfortunately. It would be nice if there was some guarantee to see a new breakthrough complete with experimental confirmation every ten years or so, at least, but why should the world cater to our wishes like that? Physics is unique among the sciences in that the most lamented problem (at least in the public perception) is that physical theories (like the QFTs making up the Standard Model) work so damn *well* that it is extremely hard to find anything deviating from the theory (with some obvious exceptions that don't provide leads that are easy to follow) and requiring new explanations. But we know that there are some problems that need new explanations and why shouldn't brilliant people like Witten follow those theoretical leads they find most convincing and interesting?

I don't know what exactly do you mean by curling a dimension by energy saturation but therr people out there working on two time dimensions. For example, see the work of Itzhak Bars.

@@Phymaths Matter is saturated near that point of an accelleration when it is close to forming a black hole. Black holes beeing a only a surface, crossing that point will strip of 1 dimension? What would happen in a hyperdimensional world with black holes? Is it still -1 dimension? Now reverse that point of view and imagine a uniformly accellerating 4-d hyperdimension. Would it curl up that 4th dimension? And we would end up only seeing 3 Dimensions?

I'm working on a one-year master's degree equivalent quantum optics. It's no joke... so many stochastic differential equations involved.

Not always. Magnetic monopoles can be stable. They carry some magnetic charge and it needs to be conserved. It means that monopoles can't just diappear. They may break into smaller monopoles but something carrying the monopole charge will always be there.

Linguistics isn't learning languages per se. It scientifically studies language in general. Structuralism comes out of linguistics via Ferdinand de Saussure, which was hugely influential on the then developing field of social science. I'm not familiar with every area of linguistics, but, due to this relationship to structuralism, quantitative linguistics remains a thing, along with all the statistical testing one would expect in any social science. That being said, I don't know if Witten did quantitative linguistics or some other branch.

I am not sure if learning linguistics is the reason of his intellect and I am also not sure if learning linguistics can make someone a good mathematician. The only thing that I know is that linguistics do have a mathematical aspect to it. For example, Chomsky's work has mathematical aspects to it.

It was his first year of applied maths as a graduate student. At Princeton, you can make a switch from Applied Maths from Physics. I guess at most universities, you can make such a switch as these fields aren't that far apart.

Thanks for your feedback, and thanks for watching.

Thanks

Don't think it is a useful question to ask. Witten is much more seniour than Terry Tao and their domains are different. Tao does some physics (fluid mechanics) but he doesn't do significant work on theoretical physics. In contrast, Witten doesn't work on topics like analytic number theory (one of the things that Tao works on). So, this question is not a useful question to ask. Both of them are giants of their fields.

I won't have to do that if you want a piece of work that was verified experimentally. If you look at 4:07 you will see that I mentioned a photon-photon scattering calculation done by him, which was tested experimentally. Moreover, his most cited paper is his paper on AdS/CFT. AdS/CFT was used to predict the behavior of the viscosity of the quark-gluon plasma and at that time, all other methods failed to give the correct prediction. The prediction of AdS/CFT about the viscosity of the quark-gluon plasma was tested in the mid-2000s by heavy ion collider experiments. So, here are two things that have some experimental proof. Surely everything that he has worked on doesn't have experimental proof yet but some of the things that he worked on do have experimental proof. Thanks.

Its quite sad too 😅😊

Thanks for your comment and for your feedback. I tried to make this as accessible as I could while not misrepresenting what I was reporting. Surely, a better job could have been done, and I would try to better my future videos of this kind. Thanks for your feedback, and thanks for watching.

Pretending Hawking is in the same league as Einstein and Newton is just silly and shows no understanding of the history of physics. Mathematically, Witten is prolifically clever, but in the development and integration of fundamental physics with empirical and experimental physics, and with astronomy and cosmology, the name of Witten will be forgotten within fifty years.

From here: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-UJkxRqoH1K0.htmlsi=WHiE26GrgiR2jxaS

@@Phymaths thanks❤️, big fan of yours

Welcome. Thanks for the appreciation 👍

Ok if you are actually saying this, then I am glad to know that. If this comment is sarcastic, then I would say that sure, this video is at a popular level, omitting many details out. If you want to read about more details, then I can recommend recources to read (depending on the topics that you want to study).

Why do you want to send it to Witten? You can just publish it, or put it on arxiv.

Very

Well, if you want something that has been tested, then as I have mentioned in the video, he did a photon photon deep inelastic scattering calculation that was tested later. Moreover, his paper on AdS/CFT (also mentioned in the video) was very important in development of AdS/CFT and AdS/CFT was used to predict the viscosity of quark gluon plasma (where other methods failed) and it was tested in early 2000s at RHIC (Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider).

@@Phymaths So nothing related to String theory? So nothing which he has done which is related to String Theory has anything at all to do with science and the scientific method? I'm glad we agree he is not really a scientist because he does not use the scientific method for the vast majority of what he has done.

​@@markboggs746did you just ignore the comment? smoothbrain

​@@98danielray Did you just ignore my reply? I will post it again, perhaps you would like to reply to it rather than casting insults while failing to use capital letters in your sentences? Here is the message again: "So nothing related to String theory? So nothing which he has done which is related to String Theory has anything at all to do with science and the scientific method? I'm glad we agree he is not really a scientist because he does not use the scientific method for the vast majority of what he has done.!" Do you agree that he does not use the scientific method for the vast majority of what he does and has done? Or not? Simple question. Try to answer Perhaps you think he has? Explain that?

This isn't "Smart" guy, this is Intelligence. Intelligence is based on the amount of information we can store and how we connect that information. Yes, he is that Intelligent.

I already made one some days ago. Here is the link: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-0sYzvjg5jcY.htmlsi=mAWxQvLFwWJ3mJbl Thanks.

Thanks but these are the things related to physics that you might have missed in those 19 minutes. 1) His Ph.D. work on asymptotic freedom 2) His work on deep inelastic photon scattering, which was later confirned by experiment (also mentioned in the video) 3) His work with Seiberg which made progress in solving the quark confinement problem (which is a big problem in QCD). It didn't solve the quark confinement problem because they assumed another symmetry to hold but the original quark confinement problem is to be solved without that symmetry. 4)His work on positive energy theorem was done for General Relativity. 5) His paper (which is his most cited paper) on AdS/CFT and AdS/CFT is something that has actually made tested predictions. For example, it was the only thing that could explain the observed viscosity of quark gluon plasma. The prediction of AdS/CFT was confirmed in early 2000s. For the full story of this dicovery, read pages 122 to 130 of J.Conlon's book "Why String Theory". Thanks.

@@Phymaths thanks. Yea I was trolling a bit. First three are obviously big steps in physics. 4 and 5? I wouldnt put my money on that. Not sure why would anyone care about positive energy theorem in gr? Also I have been told that AdS/CFT so far really didnt do anything usefull by someone who knows better (Caltech professor) but I dont know, I am just humble experimentalist. I know Maldacena original paper is like the most ever cited one but has that ever lead to anything? Sure, it was a path well worth following, just didnt pan out particularly.

​@@tomaschlouba5868"just trolling"