[Recording Start] 

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I had another topic for today about Edwin. As you know, he’s a colleague of mine and is a professor in cosmology at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan. Mir Faisal, he’s a devout Muslim; really smart guy and much more liberal than even me and has very interesting takes on things. He’s specialized in String Theory, Quantum Mechanics, Cosmology and other areas. He and I founded the Canadian Quantum Research Center. I think out of 100 or so centers, it was listed like 41 for citations or something, based on the team and that’s within the first year. So, we’re doing good. I’m the administrative director and he’s a scientific director. We’ve had two conferences with some prominent names in those conferences that were virtual. Now, I remember having a conversation with him which is benign, so I don’t think it’s breaking any trust here. He talked about Ed Witten writing something like maybe 200 pages of good solid material every month. So, that became the basis of a statement Ed Witten produces something like a PhD every month. This was said casually in a conversation.

Rick Rosner: Yeah, it’s like a book a month or a PhD thesis a month.

Jacobsen: Yeah, and we were talking because I was living with him for about five days in Kelowna, I was visiting, which is north of where I am now. Now, that was an interesting experience and conversation. I remember Eric Weinstein, a mathematician talking about being afraid of Ed Witten; the only person he’s terrified of. He mentioned stories of how professors would hide when Ed Witten would be coming around.

Rosner: Probably because Ed Witten was good at analysis and like tearing your structure that you thought about for months and years to bits with a couple of well-placed questions.

Jacobsen: Yes. He mentioned that we don’t know what operating system Ed Witten is working on. 

Rosner: All right so, let’s go from there which is if you think hard about physics all the time or whatever you’re thinking about, and physics has room to hold a lot of thought, then you’re going to get really good at it and you’re going to be better at it than a lot of people who can’t devote whether because of their personality or because family or whatever intrudes. Paul Erdős was this traveling mathematician; he had no fixed address. He would go from bed to couch. If he liked your math, if he liked the things you were working on or maybe if he just liked you and you were a mathematician, he’d come and live with you for a week or two and he would work with you on the things you were thinking of and you would like get three papers out of within the few weeks he spent with you. So, he probably has more papers because he teamed up with more people than I think any other mathematician ever and he lived a long time.I’m going to click on his Wikipedia; one of the most prolific mathematicians of the 20^th century. He lived to 83 and published around 1,500 mathematical papers during his lifetime which is number one. He firmly believed math to be a social activity and also it probably doesn’t mention this in the article but I think he took a lot of speed. He liked being sped up. So, yeah, he was like another Ed Witten guy who could only think about math to the point where he didn’t even have a place to live. He just would go sleep on other mathematicians’ couches and do math with them. It’s a deficiency of mine that I’m super unfocused on the shit that I should be thinking about. The end.

[Recording End]

Authors

Rick Rosner

American Television Writer

http://www.rickrosner.org

Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Founder, In-Sight Publishing

In-Sight Publishing

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