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Yes, Witten is the by far better physicist and he knows that laymen don't listen to real science anyway, so why bother? That he isn't a good speaker is not true, by the way. I listened to several of his seminars and even with my limited capability with regards to theoretical physics and mathematics I found that Witten has the most amazing intuition as a physicist. He communicates his insights to those of us who don't share his amazing gift quite well. Do you have to bother with him if you aren't in the field? No. There is nothing of importance that he can teach you.

@@schmetterling4477 "by far the better physicist" - yeah, no. Not even close.

@@maultwo Yes, absolutely. What Witten has done is far more complicated than Feynman's contributions. They don't hand out Fields medals for trivial stuff. Theoretical physics has increased in complexity exponentially over the course of the 20th century. That doesn't mean that it's as impactful. It isn't. This is a game of diminishing returns now. That makes it harder, not easier.

​@@schmetterling4477 The fact that you're judging this by "complexity" proves you don't have the slightest clue what you're talking about. Witten is more of a mathematician than a physicist, and most of his esoteric string theory junk has highly questionable if not totally nonexistent real-world applications. Feynman achieved more with actual physics in his little pinky (QED, Feynman path integral, Feynman diagrams, etc.) than Witten will ever accomplish in his lifetime, and that's a fact you're going to have to accept.

@@maultwo Witten is both. That's a rare talent. String theory is highly impactful to the mathematics community, even if it does little for high energy physics. Feynman has never contributed anything on that level for starters. Witten's results are precise. Feynman's path integral doesn't even converge, not even in a weakly coupled theory like QED. ;-)

That was a lot of fake news, kid. ;-)

He is trying to explain path integrals to you and while they do look somewhat similar to Huygens-Fresnel, they do NOT give the same result unless you reduce them to the single quantum case, which he does, of course, because the multi-quantum case can not be represented graphically. Maxwell's equations and classical waves just happen to be ONE possible solution to QED... among an infinite number of solutions that most people are not familiar with. I would suggest that you refrain from commenting about something that you do not understand, yet... not even a little. That one can not understand a path integral intuitively is correct: it's a mathematical object that pulls you through an infinite dimensional space. It also does not describe one system but a quantum mechanical ensemble of systems that contains an infinite number of copies. I am personally quite happy to admit that I can not grasp that "with my inner eye". The analysis of quantum fields is, whether we like it or not, a very difficult topic. To pretend otherwise would be a lie.