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He’s probably one of the greatest physicists since Feynman. He is standing on the shoulders of giants, but he himself is also a giant.

He and Maldacena have advanced modern theoretical physics by leaps and bounds over the last few decades. More so than Hawking and others who you’ve probably heard of. Not to slight Hawking, he was a great physicist, but he is no Witten.

Now onto the “out there” ideas. I assume you’re talking about his contributions to string theory and the likes.

Here’s the thing.

Most theoretical physics is grounded on real observations and experiments. It’s not made up for the sake of sounding cool. Here’s some physics that were entirely theoretical until recently:

  • Black Holes
  • Higgs boson

Yes, black holes until recently were theoretical. Although most physicists thought they existed, because they were founded on rigorous mathematics (general relativity), which had observational proof in other areas. Incidentally the founder of GR (Einstein) didn’t believe they existed at the time.

You may have also heard of Quantum Field Theory. This was first explored in the late 50s and early 60s, but basically discarded at the time in favour of another theory called S-Matrix Theory. Way back in the 50s people started noticing the spin of certain particles increased according to the mass squared, and it shouldn’t have. A few different theories were proposed - S-Matrix Theory and QFT. S-Theory won out in the beginning, but after some promising work on QFT, QFT won.

QFT had a problem though and it couldn’t explain gravity, and so people started poking around and exploring with S-Matrix Theory again to see if that could help. Some people were already tinkering with it (guys like Lenny Susskind), but there were a few problems with S-Matrix theory, such as the fact it predicted faster than light particles called Tachyons.

Well some more physicists came along and “patched” some of these problems, and it was noticed that the graviton could be described using this theory. Not only that, it could also describe other particles as well. So gravity AND QFD, QED. One theory for everything.

This theory was string theory.

But again, there were problems. There were many string theories, and they were complicated. Edward Witten came along and unified a lot of these different threads into one theory that actually made sense, which was an extremely complex thing to do.

And while String Theory probably isn’t “real” (what is?), it’s been an extremely useful tool that has been applied to many modern physics problems (such as black hole information paradox) that has helped advance theoretical physics considerably.

Now, are these theories making a big difference in the laboratory? No, not yet. But there’s been hundreds of years between theory and experimental verification. But even so, we do have ways of testing some of these artifacts of these various theories at least in principle. And if not, they’re still extremely useful tools that will help with future theories.

Now all this is to say that the “out there” stuff started with some observations that can’t be explained using our standard theories, this then resulted in layers upon layers of complex mathematics (but always grounded in “real” physics) that Edward Witten has been instrumental in simplifying and understanding. The results of which have led to new understandings and insights of everything from how the universe may have started, to gravity, to what the world is made out of.

He is a modern day Einstein, it’s just modern day physics is now far beyond the realm (energy levels) of easy experiments. It takes time, money, and effort to be able to see the results.

Theoretical physics isn’t making shit up, it’s untangling the web of 100 years of mathematics, experimental data, and disparate theories, and providing a framework for experimentation. Maybe even after your death.

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