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Hello and welcome to the podcast edition of the Life Scientific.

I'm Jim Alkalili and this is the show where I get to talk with some of the world's leading scientists

and you get to find out what drives them, so sit back, get comfortable and enjoy the episode.

Hello, today I'm in the USA, in Princeton, New Jersey to be precise,

a place that's hosted some of the greatest scientific minds of our time.

My guest is one of them, the physicist behind M theory,

a leading contender for what is commonly referred to as the theory of everything,

one that combines the two current mathematical descriptions of the physical universe,

quantum mechanics and Einstein's theory of gravity.

Edward Witten is professor emeritus in the School of Natural Sciences at the Institute for

Advanced Study, just down the road from here. Einstein was one of its first professors and J.

Robert Oppenheimer, its longest serving director.

Over a career that spans some of the most exciting periods in modern theoretical physics,

Edward Witten has become known as the originator of many significant ideas and breakthroughs

in our current understanding of the nature of reality itself.

So hold on to your hats people, but even he has his challenges.

A fascination since his student days has been the problem of quark confinement,

a subject that still eludes our full understanding even today.

Don't worry, we will come to that. In the meantime, his attitude to finding fresh answers

remains resolutely pragmatic. He says the hardest part of research is always to find a question

that's big enough that it's worth answering, but little enough that you actually can answer it.

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