The Power of Ed Witten

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Ed Witten is considered to be one of the smartest humans in history or at least mathematical physicists in history. He has had this unique vision of the subject he was able to connect different things especially find connections between quantum physics and mathematics almost unparalleled I don't think anyone comes close in some sense in the last you know 50 years to him, says David Wheeler. The current gap between the sophisticated theories which came from applying sophisticated mathematics and the actual universe means we are kind of at a very interesting place right now according to Wheeler.

Edward Frenkel is a mathematician at UC Berkeley working on the interface of mathematics and quantum physics. He is the author of Love and Math: The Heart of Hidden Reality. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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OUTLINE:
Here’s the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time.
(00:00) – Introduction
(05:54) – Mathematics in the Soviet Union
(16:05) – Nature of reality
(27:23) – Scientific discoveries
(40:45) – Observing reality
(56:57) – Complex numbers
(1:05:42) – Imagination
(1:13:33) – Pythagoreanism
(1:21:28) – AI and love
(1:34:07) – Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems
(1:54:32) – Beauty in mathematics
(1:59:02) – Eric Weinstein
(2:20:57) – Langlands Program
(2:27:36) – Edward Witten
(2:30:41) – String theory
(2:36:10) – Theory of everything
(2:45:03) – Mathematics in academia
(2:50:30) – How to think
(2:56:16) – Fermat’s Last Theorem
(3:11:07) – Eric Weinstein and Harvard
(3:18:32) – Antisemitism
(3:38:45) – Mortality
(3:46:42) – Love