Time magazine recently called him "the most brilliant physicist in the world. Perhaps the most brilliant physicist who has ever lived."
Well, who can this genius be, who is alive in our time and is "perhaps" greater than Aristotle, Archimedes, Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Einstein and the rest?The man of the moment is a 45-year-old professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, near Princeton University in New Jersey. His name is Edward Witten, and he works with Superstring Theory.
Superstring Theory describes the guaranteed-final-absolutely-smallest-pos sible-anythings-in-nature as being not minuscule "points" but tiny vibrating strings. It's as if physics, instead of dying of confusion, said: "Don't cry, everybody. A full stop's just a hyphen seen from a different angle."
Superstring Theory brings many physicists the closest any of them will ever get to taking recreational drugs. Witten didn't dream the theory up, but he was inspired by it when he was a teenager, and he in turn has inspired scores of others to believe that it will come to dominate the world of physics.
There are those who speak of Witten's lanky sex appeal. He has dark, slightly graying hair curling over the kind of brow you can't do without in his game. Colleagues say he's no nerd - just a down-to-earth guy.
He has vaguely boyish looks - as if his mom made sure he had a nice suit and then they could only find his second-best pair of glasses. But in calling him "The Martian," students are being hilariously unfair, especially since there's no one on Earth for whom they could have greater reverence.
He's happily married to physicist Chiara Nappi, and they have three children - Daniella, 16; Ilana, 14, and Rafael, 6. For their benefit there's a strict house rule: At suppertime they may talk about life and everything - but not the universe.
Nappi speaks of her husband as coming "as close to you can get to being a genius."
"It's like, with Ed you have a field which is completely illuminated, so he just has to look around and figure out the connections. For most other people it's dark and all they have is a flashlight."
Nappi does admit, though, that "a little decision can be a big deal for Ed. Figuring out what is the best exercise bike - that is an impossible task for him."
There are those such as Sidney Coleman, a physicist at Harvard, who are clearly in Witten's fan club: "Everything Ed touches is golden. If you go into any physics department, you can see that people are touched, and touched deeply by Ed's work." Nobel prize winner Stephen Weinberg says Wit-ten is "incredibly smart" and calls his combination of abilities "probably unique." John Bahcall, a colleague at the Institute for Advanced Study - and himself no slouch - says: "Ed Witten has made a number of contributions each of which could have been a once-in-a-lifetime discovery."
Everyone who knows him calls him Ed. It's difficult to imagine people talking of "Ike" Newton, "Mickey" Faraday or "Albie" Einstein, but times have changed. "The Martian" isn't his only nickname. A number of science writers dubbed him the "Superstrings Super-star."
Looking at the underlying structure of matter is only one aspect of a physicist's work and is what scientists disdainfully call "gee-whizzery." But since size really isn't everything, it's best to get it over with first.
According to John Schwartz, one of the pioneers of the theory who influenced Witten - and who is now himself profoundly influenced by Witten - a superstring is so small that it looks up at an atom as an atom looks up at the entire solar system.
As for atoms: before the end of this sentence, there are almost four billion atoms in the dot of ink on the "i" of the word "tiny." So, clearly, neither Schwartz nor Witten nor anyone else has ever actually seen a superstring. No one had ever seen an atom until the 1980s and the development of a powerful enough microscope; any sub-atomic particle can only be detected among jets and traces once particles of atoms have been sent smashing into one another.
Besides, there's a class distinction among physicists. Witten is not an "experimental physicist," which is boffin-speak for "he doesn't do the dirty work." Experimental types go looking for particles, while theoretical physicists sit at their desks with computers, pens, pencils and paper. In fact, Witten is known for doing most of his calculations mentally. But physicists' calculations pertain to questions of far more import than "How small is small?" And many of those deeper questions are answered by superstrings.
Physicists have always studied the forces of nature: Superstrings are said to unite them all. Physicists have always wanted to know how the universe began: super-strings, apparently, will rerun the movie, including the scene before the credits.
A number of authors have even claimed that superstrings will provide humanity with a theory of everything, taking knowledge to areas hitherto undreamed of and encapsulating several millennia of accumulated learning into a single equation that could be printed on a T-shirt.
"I don't like to speculate about theories of everything," Witten says, but he has called superstring theory a "miracle.'
He used to be described as shy, but even his closest friends say he now enjoys being center stage giving presentations.
At the age of 12, Witten was already having letters opposing the Vietnam War published in the papers. His father, Louis, is a physics professor, too, now in Cincinnati, who says: "I would talk to Ed about science the way I would talk with adults." This was when Witten was 4 years old.
The Institute for Advanced Study, where Witten works, is like any haven for the exceptionally gifted, set apart and cushioned by lawns and 800 acres of woodland. Turn left on Olden Lane and you're walking in Einstein's footsteps. For 30 years - including 22 at the institute - Einstein labored on just one problem. His failure to solve it caused him untold pain. He had hoped to bring together what Witten now calls the two great pillars of 20th-century physics.
The first is Einstein's own General Theory of Relativity, which is, above all, a theory concerning gravity. The second pillar of modern physics consists of theories dealing with the quantum realm.
What thwarted Einstein and continues to thwart physicists today is one simple, frustrating fact: gravity seems not to exist in the quantum realm. It would be difficult to find a more important quest in all of science than solving this conundrum.
Witten is excited about super-strings because, first, a vibrating thread-like entity is much easier for calculations than something point-like, which is how particles have always been imagined. The full stop looked at from a different perspective is not an ending but a hyphen, a link to a new beginning and the making of our world.
Second, these strings are believed to thrum like strings of a musical instrument, and as they do so, a wide variety of energies emanate from them as in a highly complex chord, but instead of held notes, the string produces streams of particles. So all of creation is somehow tuned into existence.