yeah, i just watched a bunch of interviews of this man, and looked at his accomplishments… this guy is widely considered the greatest living phyiscist
if you were to ask the top physicists in the world who the greatest physicist was, i bet you over half of them would say “Ed Witten”
this guy is the only non-mathematician to win a fields medal,
he came up with M-Theory, the 11 dimension string theory, which sparked the second revolution in string theory and which is the dominating theory right now
he is the highest rated scientist according to H-Index in the world
This is an argument against him, not in his favor. Show me someone who can figure out a way to test the string model, and that guy I’ll call a genius. As it exists right now, though, it’s mostly just mental masturbation.
Personally, I’d say that the greatest living physicist right now is Kip Thorne. But I doubt you’d get half of all physicists to agree on any one candidate.
While Witten may well be the greatest living physicist, I am waiting for the physicist who will lead us out of the morass and find a scientific (that is, testable) theory that unifies gravity and the other forces. That one will be universally acknowledged as the greatest living physicist. However, Witten is also a top mathematician.
I’d put in an argument for James Clerk Maxwell; aside from being the father of electrodynamics and laying the groundwork for both quantum field theory and special relativity, he did considerable work to advance the field of optics and color photography, published the seminal paper on early control theory, and laid teh foundations for statistical mechanics and modern thermodynamics. That’s one smart Scot. But Newton is more recognizable to the general public.
Everybody knows Sir Isaac departed our world in 1727, only to be cruelly resurrected in 2369 and cursed to eternally play poker with the likes of Einstein, Hawking and a wide-eyed albino who asks too many questions.
I do not recall where I read it, but physicists were asked to rate their colleagues to find the most (maybe top 50 or 100) groundbreaking and influential in their field. Hawkings was not on the list, but he is good at public relations for science.