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http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2005/jan/20/science.research
The Guardian, Thursday January 20 2005
"Edward Witten is so softly spoken that his voice sometimes threatens
to drift away completely. His desk is a jumble of papers and his
blackboard a mess of equations. But his hushed words come straight to
the point and are infused with understanding and passion. Witten's
quiet manner belies his status. In his role as de facto scientist-in-
chief of string theory, Witten, the Charles Simonyi professor of
mathematical physics at the Institute of Advanced Study (IAS) in
Princeton, is undoubtedly the heir to Albert Einstein's title of
greatest living physicist. If Einstein were alive today, he would
probably be a string theorist.....As personal opinions go, Witten's
make other scientists sit up and listen. His ideas in the development
of string theory are legendary. "There is no question of the
extraordinary quality of Witten's intellectual achievements," says
renowned physicist Roger Penrose in his latest book, The Road to
Reality. "Where Witten goes, it does not take long for the rest to
follow." Witten himself does not approve of the cult of
celebrity....Predictably, Witten is modest about his achievement.
"It's an exaggeration to say that I came up with M-theory," he says.
"We came up with bits and pieces but there's a long history behind
it." Wherever the credit lies, there is no doubt that M-theory took
the already bizarre world of string theory into even stranger
territory. Before M-theory, strings existed in a world with 10
dimensions. These included a dimension of time, the three familiar
space dimensions, as well as six extra dimensions, curled up so small
that they are invisible. M-theory demanded an extra dimension for
space, taking the total to 11......The future for the string theorists
looks bright but there are still some basic questions for physicists
to answer. The first is simply - what is the theory describing? "This
is unlike general relativity where Einstein laid out the principles
and then he derived the consequences," says Seiberg. "We are in the
very bizarre, unprecedented situation where we know how to derive some
of the consequences but we don't know what the fundamental principles
are."

Pentcho Valev
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