During a visit this fall, I spotted Witten on the Institute’s central lawn and requested an interview; in his quick, alto voice, he said he couldn’t promise to be able to answer my questions but would ...

String theory pioneer Edward Witten has won the 2010 Isaac Newton Medal of the Institute of Physics for “his many profound contributions that have transformed areas of particle theory, quantum field ...

A physicist said he would probably donate part of the $3 million he won in a surprise award to J Street, the liberal pro-Israel group. Edward Witten, a professor of mathematical physics at the ...

One of my favourite radio programmes is The Life Scientific, in which the physicist Jim Al-Khalili talks to leading scientists about their lives and work. Al-Khalili introduces this week’s guest as ...

Albert Einstein labored unsuccessfully for decades to create a theory that would merge relativity and quantum physics into one tidy mathematical package. But where Einstein failed, physicists may ...

At a 1990 conference on cosmology, I asked attendees, who included folks like Stephen Hawking, Michael Turner, James Peebles, Alan Guth and Andrei Linde, to nominate the smartest living physicist.