Nobody notices that they are in the presence of a certified forklift operator in the room. It was me. Filming the whole conversation.

Thank you Eric for leading us to this gem!

Edward Witten's speeches are like academic essays) 1st paragraph, 2nd paragraph, Transition words, excellent grammar

It's kinda crazy how Witten, even as a young guy seems to hold court, with these older, eminent physicists almost deferring to him, asking him all the questions. Apart from his obvious physics expertise, Witten's knowledge of history and context of physics is pretty amazing.

This kid Witten is going places.

Oh my god! Watching witten and Salam have a argument is like seeing Plato and Aristotle have a dialogue.

Great respect for Dr.Abdus Salam and Edward Witten. Witten looks so young in this video.

This has got to be the most intelligent conversation ive ever heard

The sheer breadth and intensity of Witten's understanding of both physics theory and history is incredible.

After 4 years of this interview, Witten won the fields medal and you can see his passion and enthusiasm for Maths and Physics here...Sadly Abdusslam the noble laureate passed away in 1996 ...

I love how we can see the Witten ponder something, smile like a kid thinking about if he should present this idea, then he sends it.

33:29 brilliant camera-work

All dead except one, but yet here we are 36 years later, watching them as they are being alive talking to each-other for us to watch and listen. It's what you leave behind when you die that counts, if you do, you never really die.

People like this are simply a gift to humanity for this whole species to progress further

Absolutely loved it

amazing to hear this!! thanks for posting

Loved the conversation. this is more than 30 years old and feels like I am watching it live.

Thank you so much for sharing this with us, simply wonderful!

Every few no longer I come back and watch this video. It's surprisingly relevant

What an honor to watch the great minds together!

OMG the brilliance of this conversation is mind blowing

The best video I've seen in a long time, thank you for the upload

So fortunate to hear the conversation amongst these great personalities...

Thanks for uploading this. can you please make closed caption available ? i have a friend that would love to understand it but he's def.

Before I ever heard Witten speak I just saw him in pictures and thought he looked like a badass who'd probably have a baritone, authoritative voice.

this is just amazing....all beautiful minds in one room...

Absolutely fascinating to hear them talk about gravitational wave detection

Abdus is like teacher seeing his extraordinarily brilliant student.

So many of the most brilliant physics minds in a discussion - just AWESOME !!!

Wow how incredible to have stumbled upon this. Thank you to the uploaded.

I get goosebumps when I listen to this conversation. I only understand it partly, but the notion that by the privilege of listening this you are at the forefront of science and understanding is simply stunning

one of the greatest minds sitting in one room and discussing the origin of ideas. this is so beautiful. One can only be filled with wonder and amazement.

The sheer knowledge, understanding and genius in this conversation is tangible even after 3 decades. Beautiful. Brilliant.

I always come to this video very often just to see Ed's talk

So incredibly rare to have a video of a deep technical discussion between the best minds on the planet.

Edward Witten is a remarkable human being with a mind of epic proportions.

I feel honored to have been witness to such a great conversation. Thank you.

Holy shit! It was quite a while ago when I received the answers to sooo many questions I had about physics, mathematics, and coming up with theories! THANK YOU for uploading this.

Witten’s knowledge of physics, math and history runs circles around his piers. I’m convinced he must have a photographic memory because his recall of extreme detail is uncanny. And most exciting is his passion and love of the subjects and intellect, he gets almost giddy when he talks. You would expect fire to come out of his ears at times. His thought is palpable.

The occasion of this conversation seems to be the day when Witten was awarded the first Dirac Medal, as Salam said at 4:25, "Dirac, who we were celebrating today by giving Witten the first Dirac Medal." The award was announced on August 8, 1985. The ceremony may have happened in Feb 1986?

Abdus Salam and Ed Witten at the same table. Two of the greatest minds who ever lived.

Interesting to visit 30 years after having a shared office next to Salam's. At. 11:00 Salam makes a reference to Chris Isham who never got into strings as far as I remember. At 19:00 Witten mentions Tom Kibble's cosmic strings - a beautiful idea, very big around 1990, not borne out by experiment. Kibble really deserved the Nobel for the Higgs mechanism for the later 1967 paper (Weinberg thought so). I do recall Salam giving a seminar on Chern-Simons which Witten had been pushing. And brings back memory of E8 - every 2nd seminar used to be on that.

Amazing video, thank you. I was lucky enough to be a student at Imperial College London and meet Abdus Salam when he won his Nobel prize in 1979. Also met Kibble who is mentioned a few times. Interestingly, they predict the detection of gravitational waves within 10 years - it took about 30 in the end.

Awesome to see their hopes at 40mins fulfilled this year :)

Literally some of the greatest minds just sitting together discussing the nature of reality at the must fundamental level….just purely fascinating.

The Brilliant Abdus Salam in his elements. Great to see all these geniuses talking. Respect from India.

Interesting to hear these long form conversations on things not seen by the human eye.

Amazing !

Its a grate privilege that to see the geniuses talking .... thank you ......actually I thing that we are in the era of converting the mathematics to a physics .......and that indeed like a great victory to a human kind, it seem as there is a continuous sound saying that there is a deep connection between our biological system and the universe....... it seem we are not in the era where we make analysing for the physics of nature by the mathematics only ......

Isn't it fantastic that we have free access to this video? 👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽

This version of Witten is so impressive. I don’t think non mathematician/physics types realise. this guy is 🤯

legends are here

I remember this conversation fondly

Dr. Abdus Salam, the genius. ♥️

So honored to see Abdul Salam speak here,

I didn’t understand shit about what they’re saying but i watched the whole thing and I’m extremely fascinated by the sheer genus of Edward Witten, those people really make you feel dumb as hell

Abdus Salam, indeed what a personality.

Beautiful minds

Who knows then,one day this smart kid wiould be world smartest person or would be one of the great Theoretical physicist,and only physicist ever who won field madal in mathematics (equivalent to nobel prize). Ed Witten is a giant in his field.!! He is actually a genius.! 💜❤❤

Nice to see scientists talking seriously about real science. And, Edward Witten is truly brilliant

To think these conversations about String Theory took place in the mid-80s and then about 10 years later Witten would complete his M Theory research that showed that all the different superstring theories of this era were in fact all the same, in their limiting cases, of one unified theory!!!

Utmost respect for Dr. Abdus Salam. One of the greatest minds of 20th Century.

It’s weird how these guys are actually intimidating, their intelligence could melt your brain

And then, twenty-two years later, Witten has to debate with ... Unzicker!

I think Lie was originally looking for the Galois theory of differential equations of some sort? Peter Olver talks about it in his very well-written book on Applications of Lie Groups to Differential Equations.

This is GOLD ! Thank You UKposts !

Very interesting discussion, even though at times it was difficult to understand them due to the quality of the audio.

I have no clue what they're talking about but it's fascinating.

These peopels are heros.made this wold very easy.thanks sir .i stute you....

Imagine this is your group of friends and you're one of them, and this is your conversation while drinking in a bar..

This should happen a lot more.

@24:00 "Galactic center with threads coming out and the threads are 100 parsecs long" That's like 8 times the Kessel Run made by the Millennium Falcon.

It's wild that 4 years after this conversation the Hubble telescope was launched and absolutely blew everyone's mind. Gonna have to go and find each of their reactions to hubble now 😂 great vid!

I would like to ask the same thing. Closed caption or subtitles... Please!! English is not my first language and I'm working very hard to understand some of the things that are being said in this video. Help me! =)

This is the first time I've heard Abdus Salam.

I love how Witten talks with his eyes half closed like he’s really thinking hard about stuff. It reminds me about me when I’m thinking hard about stuff and I try to relax so that my brain isn’t all overworking and missing the answers.

“I’m not late - given the time dilation of postulated quantum gravity in a Higgs particle accelerator I’m early in a way you could never understand.” -Witten

what a brilliant young mind Witten was at the time...

Awesome!

I'm proud to say that I understand some of the words they said.

I think Witten would cringe at how romanticized he is in this comment section. I also think it is what hampers successful communication between himself and most people today. Not to take away from his stellar achievements, of course, he is brilliant. What is fascinating or surprising to me is how understable geniuses like him are, the same impression I have of Einstein. They do not have the airy view of themselves that people tend to have about them.

19:27 the eyebrow raise of Edward Witten

Ed is 35 years of age here; a mature physicist and not a kid.

Love and Respect to Mr Sciama

I can see the Napoleon Dynamite persona based on a couple of Witten's traits. I love his level calm voice even though I have almost no comprehension of what he says.

Please allow for captions to be added.

This was on my 21st birthday and i was getting hammered at the bar on this day lol!!

Everybody sat in the same position the whole video.

Eric sent me here!!! Thanks algo.

Great video! Is there video of the Dirac Medals being awarded?

Those glasses make Witten look 3 times more clever than the average person already :P

I love how a young Ed Witten holds the older guard of physics captive with his passion for sharing scientific nuance, beyond what they may have intuited.

Did this take place before M-Theory was devised by Witten? It seems like you can almost see him come up with the idea of "going home and discovering M-Theory" at 7:19.

Fields medal winner Edward Witten with Nobel Prize winner Abdus Salam made my day.

Thank God we live in our times, bouta transcibe this whole convo plug it in chat gpt and have a blast

Who knows then that kid,one day will be world smartest person,a great Theoretical physicist,a great mind..!!❤💜❤💜

If I said I understand what is being said, hopefully I would only be fooling myself. Because when I hear Susskind's version of String Theoretical concepts, the hands-on experience of practical learning comes across as "All is Vibration", and that can be related to the quantization cause-effect of superimposed, log-antilog frequency-amplitudes in line-of-sight superposition, represented in Polar-Cartesian formatting. The library of Mathematical Conjecture is expected to fit somewhere in the same picture and it's to be expected that the Students of Witten projected concepts can be drawn into relevant research..?

This was 1986: A time if maximum optimism. Salam's SU(2)xU(1) had just unified the electroweakforce, SU(3) would soon be confirmed with 3-jet events. Gauge symmetry was king. It was pretty clear SU(5) was the GUT, and then into gravity, and it would be super. Well no. protons didn't decay, su5 was wrong, 30y later the Higgs was found but no SUSY...we are lost. There's been some fun in the neutrino sector, but otherwise: nothing new has happened in particle physics. Looking back, I put the W, Z (Salam) discovery (1985) as the beginning of the end of the glory years of particle physics...and this interview capture that optimism perfectly. Ofc Sciama hints at where the action would be: astrophysics. Cygnus X-3 is a bust, but all the mind bending data have come from above since this was filmed.

Ed Witten's undergraduate degree was in History!

This is wonderful! Does anybody have a link to a transcript?