Edward Witten

But the beauty of Einstein's equations, for example, is just as real to anyone who's experienced it as the beauty of music. We've learned in the 20th century that the equations that work have inner harmony.

I don't care about movies. I tend to play badminton once a week.

As for the forces, electromagnetism and gravity we experience in everyday life. But the weak and strong forces are beyond our ordinary experience. So in physics, lots of the basic building blocks take 20th- or perhaps 21st-century equipment to explore.

We have one real candidate for changing the rules; this is string theory. In string theory the one-dimensional trajectory of a particle in spacetime is replaced by a two-dimensional orbit of a string. Such strings can be of any size, but under ordinary circumstances they are quite tiny, ... a value determined by comparing the predictions of the theory for Newton's constant and the fine structure constant to experimental values.

String theory is an attempt at a deeper description of nature by thinking of an elementary particle not as a little point but as a little loop of vibrating string.

Away from the safety of your home, the universe was not made for your convenience.