What was the question and did his answer make any sense?

@@Za7a7aZ I asked him why did the chicken cross the road

​@@xyzmediaandentertainment8313 it saw the truth

This interview is telling. The answer was probably mega-suggestive. Ed looks like one of the best answerers from this interview.

his a super human, probably from a higher civilized universe than ours.

Witten is speech affectation and verbosity: no lab results, no experimentation, no verification, no way to test hypotheses... Witten is not a physics theorist but a physics ideologue. For decades he has lived off the budget and NO NEW REAL THEORY. He's the William Buckley of physics: verbosity without any real content or direction.

and becoming a prominent physicist while being an historian. this man is a fucking beast!

Imagine winning a Fields Medal without proving theorems... Ridiculous.

@@thepowerman8952 You should really take a look at Witten's work yourself. Why all the salt?

That was a side quest

@@iaexo No salt, I just think it's ridiculous. I have nothing against Witten, why would I? By all accounts he is a modest, self-effacing guy. Makes a change from most extremely intelligent people.

I’d say it’s more like listening to somebody TALK about Bach, albeit somebody who understands Bach likely better than you do. Any presentation of technical ideas in language for lay people is necessarily extremely limited. You’d learn a lot more about physics by studying some basic calculus than listening to popular talks or experts taking in easily accessible language. As you can tell I’m actually kinda sceptical about these professional ‘mind blowers’. Not that Witten is one btw, he isn’t. But any expert taking in this sort of way is indirectly participating in the same sort of thing.

yeah i'm starting to love this guy! incredible

Some mathematicians seem to believe otherwise. Even as far back as Pythagoras they have believed that "mathematical truths" are real, in the real world, and independent of mind. Mental maps of reality (mathematical or otherwise) seem to me to be extremely simplified mappings or sketches. The mind-independent reality is far more (many trillions of times more) and very different.

But it is uncanny how reality bends toward the the math (Road to Reality?)

​@@viveviveka2651Are you not, in fact, expressing the same thought, rephrased more elaborately?

@@AMindnamedAdam Forgive me, but you do not know that with certainty, and the hypothesis really deserves to be treated as such.

​@@callmedeno reality does NOT bend toward math. It is the opposite.

I want to watch Him making a Fried Egg...🤔

almost robotic. looked like he was glitching.

Originally a history major and linguist minor: the guy knows effective language for communication.

Tends towards infinity as what? What's the dynamic variable here?

I didn't know Bill Shatner was raw genius; the more you learn...

JLongTom Time, he’s not at zero noise level yet, he’s getting better ;)

Sounds like a WWE entry announcement

please ask him to write a popular book about it.. may seem like time waste for him, but breakthroughs have happened doing something mundane

Ichiro Akuma very well observed

Everything he says implies a metaphysic posture, you can't get away without it. I'd love to hear him talk explicitly about it, though...

It's the only way to be...

@insane hermit because he's not a pseud and he understood that mathematics is the only good metaphysics.

Lotta people under this comment need to open a book on philosophy 🤦‍♀️ And what?? He said “it’s as if the universe was made by a mathematician”. How is that not metaphysics?

Rich JMB same as Jeff Goldblum I imagine. How cool would it be if he talked like him?

@@kuruman1 Lol. Yes Ed is one of the select guests I expect Jeff invites to his private night club in the basement of his mansion. They can Trance out for hours to progressive house and slowly evolving chords, Jeff is very into his arm movements and uses them extensively as part of his repertoire

my favourite youtube comment ever congratulations

@@richjmb5522what the fuck have I just read😂

he says pure maths which we think has no application to real world can infact be used for explaining phenomenon in our natural world also we could able to create new math by finding structures in our natural world like newton did when he found calculus

I think this is just a bi-product of trying to articulate concepts which layman people are unlikely to understand. It takes a lot of energy to form what occurs on your mind into words in a clear fashion, never mind then having to dumb it down for people.

I do think you'r not actually describing scientists, but "geeks" or non-educateds who are "into science". That said, I think learning about the nature of the scientific method has its subtle nuances that are not easily understood, so its somewhat understandable, though not deemed desirable. What is a scientific fact, versus what people hear "is fact", and what are personal beliefs (alternative facts/truths), are nuances not often discussed with enough care and attention in, say, comment sections or twitter. The problem itself takes more than 160 characters...

Yep, seems like we only just started in the grand scheme of what we call nature. I beleive that rightfully understand the relation between maths and what we call physical reality will take us to the next level.

Making the extremely complex into something simple and digestible...she may not be proving the point she thinks she's making.

She is not a big fan of untestable theories like Witten's though.

@@wyqtor She's thinks math is overrated. And I agree with her.

@@peterdamen2161 I don't think that is true. However, she has stated that seeking for mathematical beauty is non-sense.

He is witty

Sceptical Scientist Now Freeman has gone😷

Gary Shepherd I know but even Dyson,Hawking and Penrose,called Ed special

@@rationalsceptic7634 Feynman and Dirac are also great.

Fanboy 375 Of course..but they are dead... Witten has won more Awards...only Physicist ever to win a Fields Medal...which is astonishing! Hawking and Penrose call him unique in the World!

Fanboy 375 Living?

Witten is spot on with the remark: "universe created by a Mathematician". The sovereign creator is the greatest Mathematician! There would be no universe without mathematics, because it is the foundation of physics.

Needing a Creator is such a Human Thing to think...🙄

@@superfuss1984 Can you explain the origin of the universe without a first causal agent? I cannot. And why not put a name on that agent, if it is a person with a greater purpose for humans?

@@The_Revealer_7 If you need a Explanation, good for you. I am happy with Things just happening. Seeing the Size of the Current Universe, i guess i am closer to the Truth. Never forget: Man created God, not the other Way around. 🤷

No, that lecture was relatively easy compared to others of his, it was just shocking.

@@annaclarafenyo8185 How so?

@@sclogse1 of course it was shocking, the theory is not complete

That’s not something to be proud of …

Or maybe they didn't want to waste their time with a theory making no useful predictions whatsoever.

Knot theory has nothing to do with "the world around us."

Claude Massé Quite! That’s the point.. that such a highly esoteric branch of maths can start from something as mundane as varieties of possible knots in a loop of string! There’s something beautiful about that.

Everyone has different talent and everyone has a right to be wrong. For example, in Hawkings’ last book he declares philosophy dead. Sorry…wrong…he is a scientist making a claim that is not based in science but is a philosophical statement. Hmmm

@@clmasse If that was true, there’d be no way to apply it in the real world. Same with other fields of mathematics, yet so much pure math suddenly winds up as “Just the right tool” for whoever needs it…some kind of connection is there, otherwise that wouldn’t happen.

​@@clmasse How do you know that?

Very nice comment. Thanks for the contribution

Sad...check in with Sabine Hossenfelder on that one. She disagrees and has written a book.

@@deevnn I know, I watched her interview as well

He could but we would have missed the biggest point of it all , part of it may be proven to be wrong by a better discovery ,our grasp of reality is not very solid and it can change in a dime as recent history shows

@@rovidius2006 Could we be on the verge of a major breakthrough in the understanding of the universe?-- the use of math in everything, simulations, computer games, artificial intelligence, realistic simulations -- all seems to be pointing at what the universe is made of -- relativity, quantum theory was 100 years ago -- we are due for a major breakthrough -- "It's uncanny how powerful mathematics is in understanding" our world.

@@williamwolfe8708 While math is a powerful tool for understanding and projecting processes in the observable universe it is limited in its scope ,it explains how it works but not how it came into being .While it is a big deal to most people many top scientists reveal of how little we know of the universe around us and how powerless we are if forces of nature would not be so friendly to us .

@@rovidius2006 Yes, we are all on a rock flying through space at, what, 490,000 miles/hr give or take, with nobody at the helm. We are truly lost in space -- total mystery. In the midst of our ignorance is the weird thing that every time we seek to clarify the truth about the little we do seem to know, it comes out in mathematical terms -- uncanny.

@@williamwolfe8708 Someone may be at the helm as we cant even see it nor the helmsman ,this is a well organized apparatus .Trajectory is well protected and its been so for life to get where it is now ,for reasons higher than our understandings .

Could be that universes which are more explainable, tend to be more stable and therefore more likely to have suitable conditions for producing an intelligent observer?

Perhaps true reality does _not_ make sense, at least not to us (perhaps not yet) and not completely. Perhaps we, with our evolved faculties (so far) have made _some_ sense of what we perceive, a subset of reality that concerns perpetuation of our genetic information.

@@Surtweig I suppose anything is possible, but if we can't even hope to view it through some kind of structured framework then we really have no hope of making sense of it. A maybe somewhat controversial viewpoint is that anything that's mathematically possible is what makes up reality. Solutions to various systems and axioms that exist somewhere "out there" in some weird way.

@@manaeiou I'd comment on this the same way I did to Dmitry Ivanov. Please see that response above.

Mathematics is merely an extension of logic, and logic delimits the possible. And since anything that is must begin by being possible, any world that is must be susceptible to be understood mathematically. There is a question of course about why much of the basic mathematics that drives our understanding of the world should be relatively simple. One can imagine coherent alternate realities in which the mathematics required to model even the simplest phenomena would be much harder. In such a case, whether there would have been the cultural impetus to develop the advanced mathematics needed to model the universe, which was clearly motivated in our actual history by the stunning successes of something like the Newtonian model, which was simple enough to appear early in the piece, and yet was very encouraging in the degree of success it had, may be questioned. Another valid point, as you say, is about structure itself. We could easily have a fatalistic world which did not follow any local patterns. Or the structure may depend on more data than we could gather - for example even simple models of mechanics may require not merely the current state vector of the universe, but the history of the state vector over the last 100 years, which would be impossible in practice to supply, so that it is doubtful we could ever evolve any theory or test such a theory empirically. There are two ways to answer such a question. One is of course a many worlds theory which says that all these possibilities have been realized in one universe or another, and in those universes where these awful possibilities are realized, civilization(at least in the scientific sense) never progressed beyond a certain point. But another way is to say that in any universe with some local structure, some questions will be easier to answer than others. For example, even in our world, we can ask questions, even in mechanics(let alone psychology or history and such) such as what would be the probability of getting heads or tails for a coin with a given nonuniform weight distribution, which involve vastly more difficult mathematics. A lot of the progress of science has always depended on asking the right questions at the right time - questions for which relatively easy answers are both empirically testable and relatively easy to model. So we keep making progress, little by little, and keep adding to our store of useful applicable knowledge. So in an alternate universe, the march of knowledge would depend on asking different sets of questions at different times. Maybe the mechanics of individual objects would be too difficult to model early on. But the mechanics of large aggregates or complexes of such objects may turn out to follow much simpler statistical patterns. And having modeled it, and used it to build useful technology and an industrial civilization, the intelligent beings in this universe may sustain the motivation in their society to develop more advanced abstract models as well as more sophisticated empirical tools to probe deeper into the fundamental laws of their world.

String theory is a quantum gravity theory, you don't know what you're talking about. There is not a good quantum gravity theory apart from string theory.

@@holliswilliams8426 quantum gravity is likely a dead end. It’s going to take a major paradigm leap in understanding to find a different idea that works.

I hear this type of comment about Witten often (Terence Tao is often included alongside him), but I think it's just a meme. What exactly distinguishes him from a thousand other utterly brilliant people?

@@JLongTom well, he said 'one of the' smartest.

@@JLongTom his work. what else would it be.

@@JLongTom … his papers

@@JLongTom Read about his contributions before asking such a nonsensical question. You have Google at your fingertips

😂

Hope you have out on the running shoes. Good luck!

Great humour, never heard that joke before, except on every fucking sitcom ever. Fucking loser.

Glob Two Says the one listening to abstract philosophical discourse. Does your comment have a purpose? Mine does. (Hint: It’s pedagogical)

@@BlackIndigenousPosse name me one sitcom where you heard that joke please.. Mister. We will be waiting for you.

Follow his Twitter mobile.twitter.com/witten271

as long as Joe stay's away from 'the simulation' - those shows were just too painful to watch

Oh wow, Ed on JRE would be next level

Orbifold Yeah. Nima with his formulation of the Amplitudhedron is astounding work.

Super into history and math. Guess me and him have something in common.

Finally something I share with him!

Did you ever end up studying under Witten?

How's that going? I met him in ~ 1983 when I was choosing a grad school and visited Princeton. I certainly had no idea what a giant he was, and was to become.

Usually such geniuses tend to be very bad teachers. They cannot explain concepts at a low enough level for their audience to understand.

​@@wyqtor considering the absolute perfection of that interview, I tend to believe he gives the best teaching experience available

At 4:45, Ed Witten says: “instanton equations”; necessary to understand “4-model”(?) field theories.

@@andrefletcher7970 Thanks for the info

Clearly you are ill informed and don't know what you are talking about. He can NEVER win the Nobel because he makes completely untestable predictions that are for all practical intents and purposes pure fiction. He has NEVER offered ANY hypotheses that can make contacts with physical reality.

Sadly, Witten will never receive the Nobel Prize in physics. There is no mathematical proof for String Theory. Mathematical proof of a new physics theory is required for the prize.

@BlueBoy 1 terence tao is one of them as well

Tell me if this guy is so smart, what has he really accomplished in physics other than leading half of all theoretical physicists down the unfalsifiable+ black hole that is string theory

​@@natevanderw because he spent his life achieving greatness rather than trying to tear it down ...

also William Sidis...+250'ish

Akhil Jalan - “Temperley-Lieb Algebra: From Knot Theory to Logic and Computation via Quantum Mechanics”

Define describe. Mathematics is very powerful at laying basic postulates of physical theory, however if one is encrouch into the domain of application, mathematics, due to our own limitations more so than others, has not provided us with an easy to grasp analytical solution. Furthermore, invistigations from a purely mathematical lens, do not give rise to all possible interesting phenomina, thus within the scope of more complex systems mathematics, again due to our own inability does not provide answers. Now, a major revolution of the past hundred years or so, is the militarisation of mathematics in attempting to solve complex real world systems, be it for applications or for exploration's sake by the use of computational methods. Mathematics is the study of order in a sense, thus anything disorderly, can not be described. Mathematics can not genreate true randomness as an example.

the Human Being, the Soul, Love, Art, Peace, Freedom, Equality, Family, Relationship, Society, Morality, Literature, Consciousness.... Anguish, Danger, Perseverance, Purity of Spirit, Intentions of the Heart.... that should get you started. Basically..... everything that matters in this life... except for, "How do things that either contain that list inside them, or are in the same universe as the things that have all that inside them, move around and interact physically with each other."

There's something called Godel's Incompleteness Theorem that describes some limitation of mathematics. I can't remember how it works, but it may well answer your question.

Many of his lectures at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton are on you tube. Just search KZfaq with his name and you can spend months watching his lectures

@@Cooldrums777 well, that´s too hard for me, I was rather refering to his philosophical believes.

You'd probably be disappointed, he strongly avoids thinking in such directions..

@@whataboutthis10 he has given many interviews and talks that are on u tube . He is a nice guy a family man

He doesn't answer philosophical questions.

And if the Universe is just a Simulation, some Cat will change the Channel and everything turns out to be for naught...🤷

He assumes reality is constant because his mind is mostly occupied with logically arranging symbols denoting abstractions of relations between apparently distinct, real objects. Ed is a genius cartographer, not an expeditionist. Future expeditionists, however, may very well make use of existing maps on their way forward, creating demand for new Ed Wittens, who formulate the new maps either positively (additively) or negatively (subtractively, recognizing previous Ed’s errors). Concept-weavers like Ed are absolutely crucial to the development of theories with more predictive potential, whether or not his concepts make up the pillars or the centerpiece. Faraday and Maxwell, Schopenhauer, Mach, Poincaré and Einstein, Copernicus and Kepler seem like good examples to me. Intuition Vs Formulation, whereby the agents of either depend entirely on one another. The historical cooperation between the two kinds of minds seems to be the most powerful driver of scientific progress. Is it a Left vs Right hemisphere cycle, where disproportionately right-brained geniuses find the patterns and the left-geniuses make them precise and useable through equations? I dunno.

In other words, rather than the “language of the universe”, mathematics seems to me the written syntax of human perception. Numbers are the written signs of our need to see differences to make sense of the world. Human intelligence in essence is the greatest faculty of difference-spotting in nature. Put a cat in front of a mirror and watch the lack of response. Do a magic trick (disappearing coin in a cup) for an orangutan and you’ll see the first traces of human-level cognition. These responses, however, don’t suggest a “truer” grasp of reality, but rather, a higher propensity to categorize and abstract what lies in perception. Lines, graphs, distance, points, atoms, numbers etc. don’t exist the way things in perception exist. They are just symbols of the way we conceptualize things, the way objects of perception are abstractly delimited cognitively. Kind of like how the written word is not the spoken word, but the two are analogous in their function of communicating concepts. I should also finally define “concept” as “abstraction lifted from perception”. Perceptions made sense of through concepts are what make up “experience” or “world”. The perceptual genius is usually an artist and the conceptual genius, a scientist. Ramanujan, Euler and Wittgenstein were aliens from the left hemisphere. Bach, Michelangelo and Nietzsche were aliens from the right hemisphere. Goethe, Da Vinci and Newton were superhuman combinations of both, the likes of which I doubt we’ll ever see again in a world drowning in information and artificial stimulus. Plenty of today’s left/right geniuses likely posses unrealizable potential to be transcendent. It’s tragic. I think Cormac McCarthy is one such example. Put that guy in the 1780s and he’s Goethe.

Is that sarcasm?

@@swavekbu4959 definately

Well said

Absolutely! Not knowing (and being too lazy to google for) the context of Wigner's "unreasonable effectiveness" quote, I am struggling to believe that someone with his skills could have meant it quite so literally. I'd be tempted to extend your constraint a) (that the universe has a structure) to speculate that, if it did not, a universe such as ours with structured things in it would be impossible. This is, of course, an "argument from personal incredulity" logical fallacy, or possibly "personal ignorance", so large pinches of salt are required.

Agreed. I don't fully appreciate this fascination with the simple idea that mathematics corresponds well with physical description. As you seem to suggest, it seems more like an unsurprising certainty since much of math has been developed to describe those physical objects. As he says, calculus was developed to describe the physical world. Well, had calculus not been useful, Newton (and Leibnitz) wouldn't have adopted it. And had they anyway, we'd instead be talking today of how much math doesn't describe the physical world! So, the choice of invention of the mathematical object matters a great deal, and such objects are usually chosen to match up with the physical world. And we're then surprised at the "unreasonable" correspondence? Calculus was hand-picked to describe the physical world. Of course it's going to then correspond. It was invented to do just that.

If I understand you correctly you seem to say that structure is geometry and therefore fits into both mathematics and physics. But what you miss in this statement is that many physical equations using math describe other thing such as charge, behavior of quantum particles etc and has no direct connection with geometric structures. I agree with Wittens and Tegmark and many other brilliant people that there is indeed an incredible fundamental and mysterious connection between math and our world. Its as if our universe is built up by pure mathematics.

@@dpie4859 The notion of structure I was employing is completely general and not specifically geometrical. The natural numbers form a structure, for instance, and there are algebraic structures, and so on.

Your answer is the smartest and more succint thing I've heard on the subject

The mathematical equation doesn't "form" the natural law, it can only describe it. So can a magic spell I suppose, but since math is more tractable, many societies prefer the mathematical equation as a description/explanation over the magic spell. If anything, a natural law is most likely created by our brains in our own language. The mathematical equation certainly did not "create" the law. All an equation can do is describe something. It's a tight narrative for the physical world. The equation for a circle did not generate the circle, it simply describes the circle, just as a historian describes World War II. Equations are narratives. Precise ones.