Macro Roundup

more interesting part of Gates’s comments,

“…lagging performance of American students overall, the national averages mask a bigger story. When disaggregated by race, we see two Americas. One where white students perform along the lines of the best in the world—with achievement comparable to countries like Finland and Korea. And another America, where Black and Latino students perform comparably to the students in the lowest performing OECD countries, such as Chile and Greece…..”

Thank you.

Our role is to serve as a catalyst of good ideas, driven by the same guiding principle we started with: all students – but especially low-income students and students of color – must have equal access to a great public education that prepares them for adulthood. We will not stop until this has been achieved, and we look forward to continued partnership with you in this work in the years to come.

If there is one thing I have learned, it is that no matter how enthusiastic we might be about one approach or another, the decision to go from pilot to wide-scale usage is ultimately and always something that has to be decided by you and others the field.

I’m also hopeful this will attract other funders focused on particular approaches or who work in one state or community.

Giving schools and districts more flexibility is more likely to lead to solutions that fit the needs of local communities and are potentially replicable elsewhere.

Education is, without a doubt, one of the most challenging areas we invest in as a foundation. But I’m excited about the shift in our work and the focus on partnering with networks of schools.

Over the last 17 years, we have invested $1 billion in the cities represented in the room in support of school improvement and redesign efforts. We are proud of that work and have seen some good things come out of it that make me optimistic about the future.

We will continue to help high-performing charters expand to serve more students. But our emphasis will be on efforts that improve outcomes for special needs students – especially kids with mild-to-moderate learning and behavioral disabilities. This is a critical problem across the education sector, and we believe that charters have the flexibility to help the field solve this problem.

We anticipate that the final 15 percent of our funding in the next five years will go to the charter sector.

We are also interested in what role we can play to prepare students for the dramatic changes underway in the workforce. We have to make work-related experiences a consistent part of high schools in ways that build student engagement and relevant skills, and that put young people on a path to credentials with labor market value in our future economy.

Math is one area where we want to generate stronger evidence about what works. What would it take, for example, to get all kids to mastery of Algebra I? What kinds of intelligent tools do teachers and students need to get there? And how might we design these in partnership with the best math teachers in the country?

But the PreK-12 research, development and translation ecosystem is underfunded and fragmented, with less than 1 percent of total government spending in public education focused on R&D.

The conditions for developing and spreading new approaches in education, particularly technology-enabled ones, are better than ever. Broadband access in schools is reaching 90 percent. Students and teachers have access to more affordable and more powerful tools for learning. Educators are seeking each other out and sharing ideas in digital communities. And there are promising developments in neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and behavioral economics.

We expect that about 25 percent of our funding in the next five years will focus on big bets – innovations with the potential to change the trajectory of public education over the next 10 to 15 years.

In Washington DC, the school district has developed an innovative professional development program that is discipline-specific, curricula-aligned, and focused on improving teachers’ instructional skills at the school level. Teachers meet weekly with a coach who is an expert in the subjects they teach. They also meet in small groups with colleagues who teach the same subject to talk through lesson plans, what’s working, and how to adjust their instruction accordingly. While still early, 87 percent of teachers say the collaboration and feedback is improving their practice and knowledge.

Louisiana is a great example of where aligned curricula and professional development is helping teachers. 80 percent of districts have adopted fully aligned curricula in grades 3 through 8. And the state has created a marketplace of preferred professional development service providers to help schools implement these curricula effectively. Teachers report that they feel more equipped to help students meet the standards—for example, by closely reading texts for meaning.

Our goal is to work with the field to ensure that five years from now, teachers at every grade level in secondary schools have access to high-quality, aligned curriculum choices in English and math, as well as science curricula based on the Next Generation Science Standards. In a few places, we also will support pilots of scalable professional development supports anchored in high quality curriculum.

We also know that high-quality curricula can improve student learning more than many costlier solutions, and it has the greatest impact with students of novice and lower performing teachers. We also know it has the greatest impact when accompanied by professional learning and coaching.

We’ll also work with teacher and leader prep providers to ensure that these lessons and best practices are incorporated into local programs to further enrich and sustain this work.

We will work with partners to document these change efforts in schools and networks and ask them to share the lessons learned with others.

But we will leave it up to each network to decide what approaches they believe will work best to address their biggest challenges. They might decide, for example, to focus on student interventions in middle school… or adapting new and more rigorous curricula… or improving support for certain groups of students in the transition from high school to college.

There are two things these networks will share in common. A commitment to continuous improvement. And a focus on addressing common problems that are identified by using proven indicators predictive of students’ learning, progress, and postsecondary success.

Over the next several years, we will support about 30 of these networks, and will start initially with high needs schools and districts in 6 to 8 states. Each network will be backed by a team of education experts skilled in continuous improvement, coaching, and data collection and analysis.

We are seeing more examples of this popping up all the time. Like the CORE Districts in California – comprised of eight of the largest school districts in the state. And the LIFT Network in Tennessee, which includes educators from 12 rural and urban districts across the state.

We believe this kind of approach – where groups of schools have the flexibility to propose the set of approaches they want – will lead to more impactful and durable systemic change that is attractive enough to be widely adopted by other schools.

This network of schools is using data to identify strategies that educators can use to solve specific problems. From 2007 to 2015, the percentage of students on track to graduate from Chicago high schools rose from 61 to 85 percent. And four-year college enrollment rates in Chicago went from 36 to 44 percent.

Excited by insights like these, school leaders in Chicago partnered with the University of Chicago to create the Network for College Success.

In Chicago, researchers also found powerful insights in their data that are predictive of student progress and success. They determined, for example, that 9th graders who succeed on four key indicators – high attendance, course completion rates, credit accumulation, and grades – are more than four times as likely to graduate. And if their grades are a B+ or higher, they are much more likely to succeed in their first year of college.

So, it identified the teachers whose EL students were doing the best, talked to them and curated their materials, and applied those best practices across all Summit schools. In less than a year, the performance gap between English Learners and others decreased by 25 percent.

Summit Public Schools, which operates 11 charter schools in California and Washington, analyzed data and determined that English Learners entered school significantly behind and never caught up.

In Fresno, a new data system revealed that students weren’t aware of their college options. So, the district created individualized college information packets for every senior who met the state’s college requirements. The result was a 50 percent increase in the number of students applying to California public universities.

Many states, districts, and schools now have the data they need to track student progress and achievement, and some are using it to great effect.

We anticipate that about 60 percent of this will eventually support the development of new curricula and networks of schools that work together to identify local problems and solutions… and use data to drive continuous improvement.

Overall, we expect to invest close to $1.7 billion in U.S. public education over the next five years.

Finally, we will expand investments in innovative research to accelerate progress for underserved students.

There is some great learning coming from charters, but because there is other philanthropic money going to them, we will focus more of our work with charters on developing new tools and strategies for students with special needs.

Fourth, we will continue to support the development of high-quality charter schools.

Third, we are increasing our commitment to develop curricula and professional development aligned to state standards.

Second, we will focus on locally-driven solutions identified by networks of schools, and support their efforts to use data-driven continuous learning and evidence-based interventions to improve student achievement.

First, although we will no longer invest directly in new initiatives based on teacher evaluations and ratings, we will continue to gather data on the impact of these systems and encourage the use of these systems to improve instruction at the local level.

So, what does this mean for our work with you and others?

And last, schools are the unit of change in the effort to increase student achievement and they face common challenges – like inadequate curricular systems and insufficient support for students as they move between middle school, high school and college. And they need better strategies to develop students’ social and emotional skills. But solutions to these problems will only endure if they are aligned with the unique needs of each student and the district’s broader strategy for change.

Schools that track indicators of student progress — like test scores, attendance, suspensions, and grades and credit accumulation – improved high school graduation and college success rates.

Teachers need better curricula and professional development aligned with the Common Core. And we see that they benefit the most from professional development when they are working with colleagues to tackle the real problems confronting their students.

As we have reflected on our work and spoken with educators over the last few years, we have identified a few key insights that will shape our work and investments going forward.

As you know, we also backed the Common Core because we believed, and still believe, that all students – no matter where they go to school – should graduate with the skills and knowledge to succeed after high school. It’s exciting to see how the standards are being brought to life in schools and classrooms. But more needs to be done to fully realize their potential.

In addition, it became clear that teacher evaluation is one important piece of several critical elements to drive student achievement. School leadership, teacher professional development, climate, and curriculum also play critical roles in improving student achievement.

But districts and states have varied in how they have implemented these systems because they each operate in their local context.

This work has helped states across the country build comprehensive evaluation systems based on multiple measures. We’ve seen promising results in places like Cincinnati, Chicago, New York City, and Washington DC, where research shows these systems can help identify teachers who need to improve and those who are underperforming… and in places like Tennessee, where three out of four teachers say the evaluation process improves their teaching.

In 2007, we began investing in the Measures of Effective Teaching project. Over the last decade, it has contributed important knowledge to the field about how to gather feedback from students on their engagement and classroom learning experiences… and about observing teachers at their craft, assessing their performance fairly, and providing actionable feedback.

Understanding this, we saw an opportunity to move our work closer to the classroom – to systemically support schools across the country to improve the quality of teaching and raise academic standards.

Over time, we realized that what made the most successful schools successful – large or small – was their teachers, their relationships with students, and their high expectations of student achievement.

Results in other places – like Los Angeles and the Rio Grande Valley in Texas -were also encouraging. Yet, over time, we saw that the overall impact of this strategy was limited—the financial and political costs of closing existing schools and replacing them with new schools was too high.

In New York City, graduation rates of students attending small schools was more than 30 percentage points higher than the schools they replaced. And almost half of the students attending small schools enrolled in postsecondary education – a more than 20 percent difference from schools with similar demographics.

When we first got involved in U.S. education, we thought smaller schools were the way to increase high school graduation and college-readiness rates. In some places and in some ways, small schools worked.

Melinda and I made public education our top priority in the U.S. because we wanted to do something about the disparity in achievement and postsecondary success for students of color and low-income students. That inequity persists today, and we are just as determined now to eliminate it as we were when we started.

But like many of you, we want to see faster and lasting change in student achievement – and our commitment to that goal is steadfast. In fact, given the constraints and other demands on state and local budgets, it’s more important than ever that we continue to explore the best ideas for improving student achievement.

Fourth-grade reading and math scores in large city schools increased at almost double the rate of public schools nationally. And the 8th grade scores are even better.

There are some signs of progress. Over the past decade, in cities like Charlotte, Austin, and Fresno, high school graduation rates have gone up rapidly.

Without success in college or career preparation programs, students will have limited economic mobility and fewer opportunities throughout their lives. This threatens not only their economic future but the economic future and competitiveness of the United States.

And for all students in U.S. public schools, the percentage of high school graduates who enroll in postsecondary institutions has remained essentially flat.

When disaggregated by race, we see two Americas. One where white students perform along the lines of the best in the world—with achievement comparable to countries like Finland and Korea. And another America, where Black and Latino students perform comparably to the students in the lowest performing OECD countries, such as Chile and Greece.

While much has rightly been made of the OECD data that shows lagging performance of American students overall, the national averages mask a bigger story.

But first, I’d like to say a few words about the state of public education in the U.S. By and large, schools are still falling short on the key metrics of a quality education – math scores, English scores, international comparisons, and college completion.

Today, I’d like to share what we have learned over the last 17 years and how those insights will change what we focus on over the next five years.

And, taking their best ideas, we wanted to pilot potentially transformative solutions and understand what worked well and what didn’t.

We wanted to work with educators to better understand their needs and the needs of their students and communities.

Our #1 priority was – and still is – ensuring that all students get a great public education and graduate with the skills to succeed in the workplace.

When our foundation began working in education in 2000, we started with a few guiding principles.

Based on everything we have learned in the past 17 years, we are evolving our education strategy. I explained what’s changing in a speech today at the Council of the Great City Schools. Here’s the text of my speech:

Melinda and I got involved in U.S. education in 2000. A lot has changed since then, but our goal has not: We still want all children in America to get a great education. It’s key to realizing the vision of America as a country where all people have a chance to make the most of their talents.

Our Education Efforts Are Evolving

Bill Gates, “Our Education Efforts Are Evolving,”gatesnotes, October 19, 2017, https://www.gatesnotes.com/Education/Council-of-Great-City-Schools

great Witten interview,

Natalie Wolchover, "A Physicist’s Physicist Ponders the Nature of Reality,"Quanta Magazine, November 18, 2017, https://www.quantamagazine.org/edward-witten-ponders-the-nature-of-reality-20171128/Physicists are talking more than ever lately about dualities, but you’ve been studying them for decades. Why does the subject interest you?What are some of these newfound facets of dualities?That’s the idea that space-time and everything in it emerges like a hologram out of information stored in the entangled quantum states of particles.Given this web of relationships and the issue of how hard it is to characterize all duality, do you feel that this reflects a lack of understanding of the structure, or is it that we’re seeing the structure, only it’s very complicated?What do you see as the relationship between math and physics?You can’t imagine it at all?I’ve heard about the mysterious (2,0) theory, a quantum field theory describing particles in six dimensions, which is dual to M-theory describing strings and gravity in seven-dimensional AdS space. Does this (2,0) theory play an important role in the web of dualities?Dualities sometimes make it hard to maintain a sense of what’s real in the world, given that there are radically different ways you can describe a single system. How would you describe what’s real or fundamental?The latter.What would you say about the prospect of an even more optimistic idea that there could be one single quantum gravity description that really does help you in every case in the real world?Are you speaking of M-theory?You proposed M-theory 22 years ago. What are its prospects today?What’s an example of something else we might need?

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No.

No. He only talks about things you shouldn’t do and things you should do in trying to arrive at a more fundamental description of physics.

Yes. The way he phrases it is broader: He wants to explain the meaning of existence. That was actually why I thought you were asking if I wanted to explain the meaning of existence.

In my career I’ve only been able to take small jumps. Relatively small jumps. What Wheeler was talking about was an enormous jump. And he does say at the beginning of the essay that he has no idea if this will take 10, 100 or 1,000 years.

My favorite pastime is tennis. I am a very average but enthusiastic tennis player.

I think when I was younger I always thought the next thing I did might be the best thing in my life. But at this point in life I’m less persuaded of that. If I waste a little time reading somebody’s essay, it doesn’t seem that bad.

I wouldn’t call him a hero, necessarily, no. Really I just became curious what he meant by “it from bit,” and what he was saying. He definitely had visionary ideas, but they were too far ahead of their time. I think I was more patient in reading a vague but inspirational essay than I might have been 20 years ago. He’s also got roughly 100 interesting-sounding references in that essay. If you decided to read them all, you’d have to spend weeks doing it. I might decide to look at a few of them.

I tend to assume that space-time and everything in it are in some sense emergent. By the way, you’ll certainly find that that’s what Wheeler expected in his essay. As you’ll read, he thought the continuum was wrong in both physics and math. He did not think one’s microscopic description of space-time should use a continuum of any kind — neither a continuum of space nor a continuum of time, nor even a continuum of real numbers. On the space and time, I’m sympathetic to that. On the real numbers, I’ve got to plead ignorance or agnosticism. It is something I wonder about, but I’ve tried to imagine what it could mean to not use the continuum of real numbers, and the one logician I tried discussing it with didn’t help me.

Don’t expect me to be able to tell you anything useful about it — about whether he was right. When I was a beginning grad student, they had a series of lectures by faculty members to the new students about theoretical research, and one of the people who gave such a lecture was Wheeler. He drewa pictureon the blackboard of the universe visualized as an eye looking at itself. I had no idea what he was talking about. It’s obvious to me in hindsight that he was explaining what it meant to talk about quantum mechanics when the observer is part of the quantum system. I imagine there is something we don’t understand about that.

I tend to assume that space-time and everything in it are in some sense emergent.

I’m trying to learn about what people are trying to say with the phrase “it from qubit.” Wheeler talked about “it from bit,” but you have to remember that this essay was written probably before the term “qubit” was coined and certainly before it was in wide currency. Reading it, I really think he was talking about qubits, not bits, so “it from qubit” is actually just a modern translation.

The other night I was reading an old essay by the 20th-century Princeton physicist John Wheeler. He was a visionary, certainly. If you take what he says literally, it’s hopelessly vague. And therefore, if I had read this essay when it came out 30 years ago, which I may have done, I would have rejected it as being so vague that you couldn’t work on it, even if he was on the right track.

I really doubt I can say anything useful. I guess I suspect that there’s an extra layer of abstractness compared to what we’re used to. I tend to think that there isn’t a precise quantum description of space-time — except in the types of situations where we know that there is, such as in AdS space. I tend to think, otherwise, things are a little bit murkier than an exact quantum description. But I can’t say anything useful.

Maybe a bulk description of the quantum properties of space-time itself, rather than a holographic boundary description. There hasn’t been much progress in a long time in getting a better bulk description. And I think that might be because the answer is of a different kind than anything we’re used to. That would be my guess.Are you willing to speculate about how it would be different?You’re referring toInformation, Physics, Quantum, Wheeler’s 1989 essay propounding the idea that the physical universe arises from information, which he dubbed “it from bit.” Why were you reading it?Observing a quantum system irreversibly changes it, creating a distinction between past and future. So the observer issue seems possibly related to the question of time, which we also don’t understand. With the AdS/CFT duality, we’ve learned that new spatial dimensions can pop up like a hologram from quantum information on the boundary. Do you think time is also emergent — that it arises from a timeless complete description?Do you consider Wheeler a hero?Why do you have more patience for such things now?Do you ever take your mind off physics and math?In contrast to Wheeler, it seems like your working style is to come to the insights through the calculations, rather than chasing a vague vision.And he was talking about explaining how physics arises from information.I see. Does he have any hypotheses?Do you have any ideas about the meaning of existence?

Personally, I thought it was extremely clear it existed 22 years ago, but the level of confidence has got to be much higher today because AdS/CFT has given us precise definitions, at least in AdS space-time geometries. I think our understanding of what it is, though, is still very hazy. AdS/CFT and whatever’s come from it is the main new perspective compared to 22 years ago, but I think it’s perfectly possible that AdS/CFT is only one side of a multifaceted story. There might be other equally important facets.

M-theory is the candidate for the better description.

Well, unfortunately, even if it’s correct I can’t guarantee it would help. Part of what makes it difficult to help is that the description we have now, even though it’s not complete, does explain an awful lot. And so it’s a little hard to say, even if you had a truly better description or a more complete description, whether it would help in practice.

Well, one thing I’ll tell you is that in general, when you have dualities, things that are easy to see in one description can be hard to see in the other description. So you and I, for example, are fairly simple to describe in the usual approach to physics as developed by Newton and his successors. But if there’s a radically different dual description of the real world, maybe some things physicists worry about would be clearer, but the dual description might be one in which everyday life would be hard to describe.

What aspect of what’s real are you interested in? What does it mean that we exist? Or how do we fit into our mathematical descriptions?

Yes, that’s the pinnacle. In terms of conventional quantum field theory without gravity, there is nothing quite like it above six dimensions. From the (2,0) theory’s existence and main properties, you can deduce an incredible amountabout what happens in lower dimensions. An awful lot of important dualities in four and fewer dimensions follow from this six-dimensional theory and its properties. However, whereas what we know about quantum field theory is normally from quantizing a classical field theory, there’s no reasonable classical starting point of the (2,0) theory. The (2,0) theory has properties that sound impossible when you first hear about them. So you can ask why dualities exist, but you can also ask why is there a 6-D theory with such and such properties? This seems to me a more fundamental restatement.

If there’s a radically different dual description of the real world, maybe some things physicists worry about would be clearer, but the dual description might be one in which everyday life would be hard to describe.

No, I can’t. Traditionally it was thought that interacting quantum field theory couldn’t exist above four dimensions, and there was the interesting fact that that’s the dimension we live in. But one of the offshoots of the string dualities of the 1990s was that it was discovered that quantum field theories actually exist in five and six dimensions. And it’s amazing how much is known about their properties.

I find it hard to believe there’s a new formulation that’s universal. I think it’s too much to hope for. I could point to theories where the standard approach really seems inadequate, so at least for those classes of quantum field theories, you could hope for a new formulation. But I really can’t imagine what it would be.

I prefer not to give you a cosmic answer but to comment on where we are now. Physics in quantum field theory and string theory somehow has a lot ofmathematical secretsin it, which we don’t know how to extract in a systematic way. Physicists are able to come up with things that surprise the mathematicians. Because it’s hard to describe mathematically in the known formulation, the things you learn about quantum field theory you have to learn from physics.

There’s another curious fact that you might want to consider, which is that quantum field theory is very central to physics, and it’s actually also clearly very important for math. But it’s extremely difficult for mathematicians to study; the way physicists define it is very hard for mathematicians to follow with a rigorous theory. That’s extremely strange, that the world is based so much on a mathematical structure that’s so difficult.

I’m not certain what we should hope for. Traditionally, quantum field theory was constructed by starting with the classical picture and then quantizing it. Now we’ve learned that there are a lot of things that happen that that description doesn’t do justice to. And the same quantum theory can come from different classical theories. Now, Nati Seibergwould possibly tell you that he has faith that there’s a better formulation of quantum field theory that we don’t know about that would make everything clearer. I’m not sure how much you should expect that to exist. That would be a dream, but it might be too much to hope for; I really don’t know.

Yes. Then there are dualities in math, which can sometimes be interpreted physically as consequences of dualities between two quantum field theories. There are so many ways these things are interconnected that any simple statement I try to make on the fly, as soon as I’ve said it I realize it didn’t capture the whole reality. You have to imagine a web of different relationships, where the same physics has different descriptions, revealing different properties. In the simplest case, there are only two important descriptions, and that might be enough. If you ask me about a more complicated example, there might be many, many different ones.

TheAdS/CFT dualityconnects a theory of gravity in a space-time region called anti-de Sitter space (which curves differently than our universe) to an equivalent quantum field theory describing that region’s gravity-free boundary. Everything there is to know about AdS space — often called the “bulk” since it’s the higher-dimensional region — is encoded, like in a hologram, in quantum interactions between particles on the lower-dimensional boundary. Thus, AdS/CFT gives physicists a “holographic” understanding of the quantum nature of gravity.

It’s open-ended because there are so many different kinds of dualities. There are dualities between a gauge theory and another gauge theory, or between a string theory for weak coupling and a string theory for strong coupling. Then there’s AdS/CFT duality, between a gauge theory and a gravitational description. That duality wasdiscovered 20 years ago, and it’s amazing to what extent it’s still fruitful. And that’s largely because around 10 years ago, new ideas were introduced that rejuvenated it. People had new insights about entropy in quantum field theory — the whole story about “it from qubit.”

People keep finding new facets of dualities. Dualities are interesting because they frequently answer questions that are otherwise out of reach. For example, you might have spent years pondering a quantum theory and you understand what happens when the quantum effects are small, but textbooks don’t tell you what you do if the quantum effects are big; you’re generally in trouble if you want to know that. Frequently dualities answer such questions. They give you another description, and the questions you can answer in one description are different than the questions you can answer in a different description.

When I arrived at his office at the appointed hour on a summery Thursday last month, Witten wasn’t there. His door was ajar. Papers covered his coffee table and desk — not stacks, but floods: text oriented every which way, some pages close to spilling onto the floor. (Research papers get lost in the maelstrom as he finishes with them, he later explained, and every so often he throws the heaps away.) Two girls smiled out from a framed photo on a shelf; children’s artwork decorated the walls, one celebrating Grandparents’ Day. When Witten arrived minutes later, we spoke for an hour and a half about the meaning of dualities in physics and math, the current prospects of M-theory, what he’s reading, what he’s looking for, and the nature of reality. The interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Researchers pore over his work and hope he’ll take an interest in theirs. But for all his scholarly influence, Witten, who is 66, does not often broadcast his views on the implications of modern theoretical discoveries. Even his close colleagues eagerly suggested questions they wanted me to ask him.

That’s extremely strange, that the world is based so much on a mathematical structure that’s so difficult.

Physics luminaries since Albert Einstein, who lived out his days in the same intellectual haven, have sought to unify gravity with the other forces of nature by finding a more fundamental quantum theory to replace Einstein’s approximate picture of gravity as curves in the geometry of space-time. M-theory, which Witten proposed in 1995, could conceivably offer this deeper description, but only some aspects of the theory are known. M-theory incorporates within a single mathematical structure all five versions ofstring theory, which renders the elements of nature as minuscule vibrating strings. These five string theories connect to each other through “dualities,” or mathematical equivalences. Over the past 30 years, Witten and others have learned that the string theories are also mathematically dual to quantum field theories — descriptions of particles moving through electromagnetic and other fields that serve as the language of the reigning “Standard Model” of particle physics. While he’s best known as a string theorist, Witten has discovered many new quantum field theories and explored how all these different descriptions are connected. His physical insights have led time and again to deep mathematical discoveries.

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 try. Later, when I passed him on the stone paths, he often didn’t seem to see me.

Among the brilliant theorists cloistered in the quiet woodside campus of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, Edward Witten stands out as a kind of high priest. The sole physicist ever to win theFields Medal, mathematics’ premier prize, Witten is also known for discovering M-theory, the only candidate for a unified physical “theory of everything.” A genius’s genius, Witten is tall and rectangular, with hazy eyes and an air of being only one-quarter tuned in to reality until someone draws him back from more abstract thoughts.

A Physicist’s Physicist Ponders the Nature of Reality