Edward Witten Quotes

Just around the same time that the string picture was formed, asymptotic freedom was discovered and made possible, in QCD, a more precise and successful theory of the strong interactions. Yet there has always been a striking analogy between QCD and string theory. If the hypothesis of quark confinement in QCD is true in its usual form, than a widely separated quark and antiquark are joined by a “color flux tube.” This has an obvious analogy to the notion of a meson as a string with charges at its ends, as assumed in string theory. Explaining this analogy would mean understanding quark confinement. This would be quite a nice achievement, since it is a longstanding sore point in theoretical physics that despite real experiments and computer simulations supporting the quark confinement hypothesis and despite a lot of ingenious work explaining qualitative criteria for quark confinement and why this notion is natural, there is no convincing, pencil and paper demonstration of quark confinement in QCD.

In Newton's day the problem was to write something which was correct - he never had the problem of writing nonsense, but by the twentieth century we have a rich conceptual framework with relativity and quantum mechanics and so on. In this framework it's difficult to do things which are even internally coherent, much less correct. Actually, that's fortunate in the sense that it's one of the main tools we have in trying to make progress in physics. Physics has progressed to a domain where experiment is a little difficult... Nevertheless, the fact that we have a rich logical structure which constrains us a lot in terms of what is consistent, is one of the main reasons we are still able to make advances.

Good wrong ideas are extremely scarce... and good wrong ideas that even remotely rival the majesty of string theory have never been seen.

Most people who haven't been trained in physics probably think of what physicists do as a question of incredibly complicated calculations, but that's not really the essence of it. The essence of it is that physics is about concepts, wanting to understand the concepts, the principles by which the world works.

I think one has to regard it as a long term process. One has to remember that String theory, if you choose to date it from the Veneziano model, is already eighteen years old... that quantum electrodynamic theory towards which Planck was heading [in 1900], took fifty years to emerge.

It's been said that string theory is part of the physics of the twenty-first century that fell by chance into the twentieth century. That's a remark that was made by a leading physicist about fifteen years ago. ...String theory was invented essentially by accident in a long series of events, starting with the Veneziano model... No one invented it on purpose, it was invented in a lucky accident. ...By rights, string theory shouldn't have been invented until our knowledge of some of the areas that are prerequisite... had developed to the point that it was possible for us to have the right concept of what it is all about.