"I feel that we are so close with string theory that—in my moments of greatest optimism—I imagine that any day, the final form of the theory may drop out of the sky and land in someone's lap. But more realistically, I feel that we are now in the process of constructing a much deeper theory than anything we have had before and that well into the twenty-first century, when I am too old to have any useful thoughts on the subject, younger physicists will have to decide whether we have in fact found the final theory."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Edward Witten, Interview (March 4, 1998), as quoted by Brian Greene, The Elegant Universe (1999) Ch. 15 Prospects.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Unification_in_science_and_mathematics
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Unification in science and mathematics
99 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Unification in science and mathematics →
Related Quotes
"It appears... that the elastic theories of light, if Kelvin's gyrostatic adynamic ether be admitted, have not been wh…"
"At first the mathematical disciplines were not sharply defined. As knowledge increased, individual subjects split off…"
"Whatever its source, mathematics has come down to the present by the two main streams of number and form. The first c…"
"If the early Greeks were cognizant of Babylonian algebra, they made no attempt to develop or even to use it, and ther…"
"Science is an attempt to represent the known world as a closed system with a perfect formalism. Scientific discovery …"
"Up to this point mathematics alone appeared to Descartes worthy of being called a science. ...in order to establish t…"
"[A]s the great extreme of dimension is sublime, so the last extreme of littleness is in the same measure sublime... w…"
"Edmund Burke, ' (1757) p. 81 of the 1898 edition."
"Copernicus had taken one course in treating the earth as virtually a celestial body in the Aristotelian sense—a perfe…"
"The more man inquires into the laws which regulate the material universe, the more he is convinced that all its varie…"