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 ...

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 ...

The theoretical physicist Edward Witten, mathematician Maxim Kontsevich and astrophysicist Rashid Alievich Sunyaev have been awarded the 2008 Crafoord Prize. Witten and Kontsevich share one half of ...

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 ...

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.