Isaac Newton
Isaac Newton once famously said “If I have seen further than others, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”. He was rightly pointing out that none of the great minds in history achieved what they did in isolation – no one starts from scratch. But true geniuses such as Isaac Newton, and Stephen Hawking, seem to see further and deeper into Nature than ordinary mortals. What these two great scientists, living three centuries apart, also have in common is that they both occupied the most famous post in world science: the Lucasian Chair in Mathematics at Cambridge. Hawking recently retired from this chair having reached the mandatory age of sixty-five, and the world awaited the announcement of his successor. I was interviewed recently on BBC Radio to speculate on who I thought it might be. The interviewer even asked me if I was interested! It shows how little he knew about science for I quickly informed him that candidates need not bother applying unless they have a Nobel Prize under their belts or an equation named after them.
The announcement that the post had been filled was made recently. I happen to know the person by reputation, but then I am a theoretical physicist; I don’t expect he is widely known outside the academic community. His name is Michael Green and he is one of the founders of string theory. In 1981, Green and the American, John Schwarz, published their work on Type I superstring theory, which led to a surge of interest in the subject. Both men have continued to be leaders in the field and it has moved on dramatically in the past decades, most famously due to the contributions of another American, dubbed as the world’s smartest man: Edward Witten.
Michael Green
I have no doubt that Green is an excellent mathematical physicist and eminently worthy of the post of Lucasian professor. But I am equally certain that it is his profile as co-founder of string theory that won him the job, and many physicists would question whether that is a good enough reason. In the past few years there have been several books criticizing string theory as not having led to its much-touted success in unifying the four fundamental forces of nature. First, there was Peter Woit’s “Not Even Wrong” and then Lee Smolin’s “The Trouble With Physics”. Both argue that string theory has had long enough to show us what it can do but has yielded very little. Many people even question whether it should qualify as a proper scientific theory at all given that it has not led to any testable results.
Of course this is somewhat unfair, since string theory is notoriously complex and rich and we have probably only scratched the surface. It could well be that at some point this century it will begin to show itself as the ultimate ‘theory of everything’. In the meantime, physicists in other areas look with understandable envy at the way string theory is able to attract funding and the brightest minds to choose it for their PhDs at the expense of others’ undoubtedly excellent research areas.
The Lucasian chair is a high profile post, and string theory is a high profile area of science. Still, Michael Green has very large shoes to fill. I wish him well.