"I dual-majored in math and physics at MIT" "I got my Ph.D in physics from Princeton working with Ed Witten" "By the time I got to Harvard..." Dude, stop. You're absoultely CRUSHING it

Rogan's podcast yesterday with Eric Weinstein brought me here lol. Was the first I'd heard of Mr. Witten. Awesome!

This is a brilliant explanation of the difference between rigour and physical intuition that so many physicists talk about

It’s been a long time since the last time I enjoyed an interview as much as this one. The passion he has and the way he describes everything, the fluency, the vocabulary.. amazing.

Love when these guys go into detail, gets you a sense of what it's really like workin on these things

Proud to say I understood some of the words used in this video.

Thanks for posting this interview, so interesting to have personal insight into working alongside Edward Witten.

While Vafa is a fantastic physicist, I think it's ironic that one of the things that Vafa gets most credit for, topological string theory, is actually Witten's idea. Vafa is responsible for Mirror Symmetry, for F theory, for various brane constructions, he's also a great physicist of the top rank, but Topological String Theory screams Ed Witten so much, just in the mathematical construction, it's like he signed it with his name by creating it, even though I always heard it attributed to Vafa. The reason it's Witten is not just that he wrote the first paper, it's also the twisted supersymmetry construction, turning it into a BRST charge, which is the construction Witten milked to get Donaldson invariants, topological field theories and knot invariants, and also Topological Strings, it's just what Witten did in that era of the late 80s.

@4:30 I loved this little anecdote. Sounds like Witten is unafraid to function as a platonist. The theoretical physicist who has a platonistic perspective has this power that every formalist and logical positivist cannot comprehend. They can of course be completely nuts and go way off the rails into fancy (like just every neoclassical economist ever), but they have this creative capacity they permit themselves. Everyone has it, but others do not permit themselves to exercise it fully.

Absolute legend. Got an email from him years back still make my day

Search for a UKposts video of 1979 Nobel Prize winner Abdus Salam discussing with Ed Witten - fascinating to listen to now. In 1990, I asked Salam what area shouid I work on - and he mentioned Chern-Simons theory in mathematics. I asked him who were the other great hope apart from ed Witten and he mentioned Cumrun Vafa. Now the other half of Chern-Simons is the famous mathematicain James Simons, who set up the hedge fund Rentech. And of course Vafa was hired by Rentech. Small world!

This is such good advice to help learning and develop passion for a subject. Connecting theory and practicality demands creativity and I think that's where truly invested people stand out from those who learn stuff just for the sake of making a living with it.

Thanks for your interview! Very informative! Is it possible to invite Ed Witten to have an interview with? I believe it will be rather exciting!

i recently learn how to solve a ribik's cube in less than 10min, so i can relate to Mr Witten. Joke aside, i'm glad our society is free enough for those people to rise and in a long terme be able to improve the live of millions.

Man i would love if you could get Edward on the show :) Im afraid of his intellect in a good way

I was unhappy in my 1st Chemistry degree - wanting to understand everything , but not having time to study the deep mathematical foundations of the physical chemistry I was being taught

As an amateur psychologist deeply interested in remarkable individuals, I am SO thrilled to have seen this! Thank U!!!

Vafa is a great physicist (one with a nice personality) in his own right, and very much worth listening to!

Vafa’s taken the career path that i want to take exactly. Go to MIT, dual major in math and physics because i love both so much, go to a good grad school for physics, and continue studying math and physics for the rest of my life. i can really relate to him

6:36 Fyi - The Calabi-Yau manifold - That's the geometry you see when on 5-Meo-Dmt

2:28 Yes, I felt the same, I starting studing Physics and I change to Maths because of the "lack of rigor". It troubled me too.

The tale of a young mathematician learning the power of hand-waving~

if my parents called me cumrun im rioting

Good stuff, very interesting...! Academic barriers are being broken...

Also an All Pro Tight End for The Dallas Cowboys? This dude is well rounded.

Can we possibly hope you do an Edward Witten interview or is this too much to ask?

My God, these intellectuals live and think in a different dimension. How incredible

The guy is not even a mathematician 🤦🏽‍♂️ I’m glad he’s getting recognition now. I known about this dude for a while and I can say… he’s fucking smart AF!!!

Please interview Ed Witten

Great story

Why are we just now hearing about this man? He's 71 years old ffs.

Like the Gaussian pill box trick?

Well his name contains the word wit.

Is every planet has der own temperature? Do gravity affect different temperatures?

Omg this man is great

Very deep and thoughtful. Also ' Cumrun ' .

This new challenges between the differing views in physics is much better than the previous mantra of E=mc². Like, it's useful, but it doesn't explain everything for a reason. Like, there is something beneath Relativity and Quantum Physics. The same way that JavaScript and HTML are under a webpage, but also alongside that there might be Django or Java under it. But, you are still going to have limits within JavaScript/HTML/Django-Java. Because, underneath that, ultimately under the webpage it's zeros and ones. And even under the zeros and ones there will be anomalies, because where did the zeros and ones come from? Physics has to keep that mentality. Religion has largely abandoned it. If we could get religion to bring that mentality back, I think that we could see the same kind of progress in society that we see in physics and labs.

a very interesting channel, no doubt.

I wanna know what He says after three Hits of DMT....

We should talk about his father and what he knows about his work… Louis Witten worked on anti-gravity for the government since the 50’s…

"Our universe", after the big bang, is a "local place" in Euclidean flat infinite 3+3D spacetime, (ie the state before the big bang, flat, infinite, no matter, no chow flow, no expansion, how else when infinite.). It's the final location that begins-it occurs at the big bang, which is not an explosion, but a change from the previous state to the next, to the plasma state, and that's an ultra-high curvature of 3+3 dimensions of two quantities. It's a boiling vacuum, it's a foam dimensions, i.e. an extremely curved environment; that is, it is a "finite" Universe in an "infinite" flat space-time that "floats" in it. The basic Euclidean network - a grid, 3+3 uncurved dimensions, in the state before the big bang, it is still around us, it exists not only before the big bang, but also after it, it is around us and we and the whole complex universe with matter and galaxies and black holes and gravitational fields, (which are crooked dimensions), we "float" in that flat basic 3+3D network of space-time. The beautiful thing is that even a mathematician will wonder if he doesn't have to explore "how" big is the singularity = "locality-our universe" and will have to recognize the possibility of proposing the reality that in an infinite 3+3D non-curved space-time there are finite localities, arbitrarily large, that is near-infinite and near-zero... Not even mathematicians can determine how large a "unit" is-a unit interval of length or time in an infinite grid grid. That place is "our universe", just one. No nonsense like “multiverses. And the Big Bang was not the creation of the universe "out of nothing" (as string theorists claim), but it was a "jump = jump change of state" from the previous to the next, a "jump" from a completely flat spacetime to a completely curved spacetime.., with extremely curved dimensions , which have been unfolding for 13.8 billion years!!!!, A) They don't expand, but unfold into the global curvature of the "real structure" (The sky full of galaxies and everything we see "floats" the differently curved dimensions of every place we see). B) And simultaneously with the global unpacking, the "local locations" are packed (in the microstructure = in the microworld.) They are packed into matter !!!! They are packed (those dimensions) after the big bang into balls = elementary particles, and these are further packed into conglomerates, i.e. into atoms, molecules, into chemical-biological compounds. Etc, etc...etc, as I have described elsewhere over the years. According to physicists from Di Valentino's team, this anomaly could be explained if the expanding universe had a spherical shape. Which is even the same if the expansion is explained by the "unfolding" of this "initial" curvature of the space-time dimension in the Bang = in a state of arrest in which time begins to pass and expand = the space and time dimensions begin to unfold; this state of space-time of ultra-high curvature of the dimensions of time and length, is a plasma, is a state of foam. In this foam "vacuum boils", on Planck scales it acquires by deformation packing mini-localities = "frozen states" - wave spheres-wave packets that become elementary particles, our human concept, packets that manifest themselves with properties such as mass, spin, charge, etc., etc. (Each particle has a different number of packed dimensions with a different curvature of these; this determines their properties). Then such an initial state of the Universe, the space-time after the Big Bang, unfolds, expands "out" "from the singularity" and still, simultaneously further, collapses, "into itself", into matter. This means that there is a clustering, "combining" of matter elements, such as quarks, leptons, bosons, etc. into even more complex units, into baryons, resonances, then into atoms, then into molecules, into compounds - this is the "packing" of curved dimensions into packages, into more complex conglomerates, and this happens not only after the big bang, but that packaging continues to this day; proteins, DNA... We still have the Planck vacuum around us, "yesterday and today", continuously throughout the history of this! The Universe..,, all around us in the boiling vacuum of the Planck and subplanck scales, the same processes are taking place as they were a million years ago, as they were a billion years ago and 14.24 billion years ago right after the Big Bang. This entire "local universe" with curved dimensions is nested in a 3+3D grid, a grid of flat Euclidean dimensions. The universe "floats" in an infinite flat space-time. And at the same time, since the big bang, there has been (realized) the unfolding=unpacking and packing of dimensions. Both at the same time. What type of curve do we have for global unpacking, I don't know, probably a parabola, I thought about it 35 years ago...; This text was *twice "deformed" by a translation from Czech to English and back again to Czech and then once again to English..., I am very sorry for the complexity of the text, which I no longer feel like correcting.

I wish I were smart enough to truly understand this stuff.

Eric wienstien comments brought me here . 😊 🙏

If you listen to this carefully what he said is very deep connection between math and physic just very deep.

*inhales sharply for 11 seconds* NEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

i searched brown-nosing and this was the first result

He also has around 100000 citations..

Name is crazyy

So disappointed that they didn't brought up Arithmetic in the conversation.

This is why I love America so much. I'm in Iranian immigrants. And we came here and America gave us the opportunity to have someone like me become a physician. And it gave someone like him the opportunity to be a professor this is how stupid the government of Iran is they're losing all this brain power just like the Germans lost the Einsteins of the world Iran lost their best brains. And America was wonderful enough to accept us.

I like counting up to twenty ,slowly

don't go glassy-eyed, he is telling you about his epiphany using the type of approach Ed Witten demonstrated to him as an undergrad.

String theory is a tenuous concept at best. Bridging the gap between the macro/cosmic world and quantum mechanics will require the collective effort of both theorists and practioners using what we already know from the Standard Model and making reasonable extrapolations from it.

Amazing

Physics seems less straight forward than math, like a gathering of evidence to support a claim or a confluence of triggers that point to a general idea, rather than a precise numeric point or equation that can be tested and verified. Super interesting, always love the podcast and appreciate the guest!

When will you have Witten on?

I know this isn't what he meant but I love the idea of mathematics as "applied physics", lmao

Lex had no idea what this guy was talking about

Rogan podcast brought me here as well.

Have we determined the “frequency” of vibrating strings in string theory? Have we determined if strings vibrate in and out of a particular dimension. Perhaps the vibration frequency crosses multiple dimensions.

Edward Witten is your favorite physicists favorite physicist

Imagine if he decided to take a break from M-Theory for a little bit and shift focus to quantum information.

Rogans broadcast got me on this Witten rabbit hole

30-year stagnation in physics... SOMETHING STINKS HERE

Nice!

What is the probability that Edward Witten beats Michael Jordan one on one?

Eddie is the Shepherd and Vafa and friends are the sheep that follow.....to a precipice.

Rogan. Yeap. Never heard of Witten and now I'm in a fucking foxhole.

I have ABSOLUTLY NO IDEA WHAT THESE BRILLIANT MINDS ARE TALKING ABOUT, BUT HELL IT SOUND GOOD. As soon as I thought I was getting somewhere, I lost it again. It a whole other world these guys live in. Going back to Biden babbeling on, which I also dont really understand but its a good Laugh😂😂😂❤

Does Witten use chatgpt?

A double major of math and physics at M.I.T?! That's the best you could do?! Come on man!

Not me trying to understand what the hell is rigorous in maths 😂😂

and what happened to Ed?

Sorry- before all else, can we just confirm this guy’s name is “Cumrun?” This is coming from someone named “Barney Cockburn,” on my birth certificate. Does he have me beat?

Physics lacks rigor, because it is in fact harder than math. The rules are dictated by Nature. Math is a game we invent, and the rules are designed by us. You don't have to work with someone like Witten to recognize the coherence of physics concepts. Any one who has read Landau & Lifshitz should be deeply impressed by it.

Dr. Witten "paints and sculpts" new Math using Physics as a model, like a Michelangelo ... but there is a dire need for the reverse: use existing Math to advance Physics, like Einstein did with help from Grossmann ... or Feynman, without much "respect" for rigor, but with deep insight and new ideas ahead of the existing Math ...

Dude only has one button on his button up polo

I do think having a Bachelor's in Arts (History and linguistics) degree made his approach to Physics and Math both elegant and unique. In other words, he brought to the table a lot more than someone with a Bachelor's in Science would.

01:55 his life was impacted in a profound way by Mr Witten. He learned from Mr Witten the art of wasting time over a theory, which, either his "genius" mind truly couldn't grasp, or his "genius" mind couldn't accept it to be false and look for something else.

Alot of J’s have been top physicists

So let it be Witten, so let it be done.

I'm terrified of this man.

Eric's boogeyman

OK I will disclose a secret to the world: Edward Witten is a alien, transported from Orion to earth to help us develop in Math.

私はモノポールブラックホールが存在すると思います。私はストリング理論は、一般的な関数と一般的な幾何学に還元されると予想します。私は光子に質量があると思います。

Wow, didn't know Vafa was the one who conjectured the mirror symmetry

Sounds like blowing a lot of smoke to me. So Witten was his advisor, and they are both very smart guys I'm sure - just like anyone working at that level in physics or mathematics - but aside from the accolades and praises - what major problem in physics has Witten actually solved?

wtf is this guy talking about at 7:16 🤣🤣

I am going to pretend I understood everything he said.

when he started talking about physics, i just realized how dumb i am because i couldnt understand anything

Well, duh...my thoughts exactly...😏

Eric Weinstein is terrified of this man

Call String theory is very convenient for physicist cause it can’t be proven or disproven

What has this genius produced?

rogan brought me here

These people's are good smart me like much ya

I wonder why Eric Weinstein doesn't agree?

Cumrun..what an unfortunate translation in English.

... but string theory is donuts bro

Hold on this guys name is Cumrun? Bruh