Edward Witten
American theoretical physicist
The numbers
3 + 2 = 5
Lo Shu grid
Missing: 4, 7. Present digits repeat to show how many times they occur.
Life path 5 — The Free Spirit
Five sits at the centre of the Lo Shu grid and at the middle of 1–9, and the tradition makes much of that: it is the number of movement, appetite and change. Practitioners associate it with travel, reinvention and an unusually high tolerance for uncertainty. The reading is equally direct about the cost — 5 is described as leaving at the point where things get repetitive, which is often the point just before they would have paid off.
Complete lines
Line of Feeling
A complete line in the grid.
Line of Action
The 8-1-6 row complete. Read as follow-through — the traditional marker of someone whose plans reliably become events.
Line of Expression
A complete line in the grid.
Line of Resolve
The 1-5-9 diagonal complete. Read as determination that survives the middle of a project, when the initial energy has gone and the result is not yet visible.
Responsibility
A complete line in the grid.
Care
A complete line in the grid.
What is missing
Missing 4
Read as impatience with structure and maintenance. Associated with starting well and leaving the scaffolding to someone else.
Missing 7
Read as reluctance to sit with an unresolved question. Associated with wanting the working answer rather than the true one.
Vedic — Ank Jyotish
Moolank 8 comes from the day of the month alone; Bhagyank 5 from the whole date. They differ, which is the ordinary case — the two numbers answer different questions.
Shani
Saturn. Labour, delay, consequence. Feared in popular practice more than any other, and read as the graha that makes people earn things.
Bhagyank uses the same arithmetic as the Western life path, so the two will always agree. That is not two traditions confirming each other — it is one calculation under two names.
In their words
It is very possible that a proper understanding of string theory will make the space-time continuum melt away.... String theory is a miracle through and through.
Vibrating strings in 10 dimensions is just a weird fact... An explanation of that weird fact would tell you why there are 10 dimensions in the first place.
I don't think that any physicist would have been clever enough to have invented string theory on purpose... Luckily, it was invented by accident.
String theory is extremely attractive because gravity is forced upon us. All known consistent string theories include gravity, so while gravity is impossible in quantum field theory as we have known it, it is obligatory in string theory.
Most people who haven't been trained in physics probably think of what physicists do as a question of incredibly complicated calculations, but that's not really the essence of it. The essence of it is that physics is about concepts, wanting to understand the concepts, the principles by which the world works.
Quantum mechanics... developed through some rather messy, complicated processes stimulated by experiment. While it's a very rich and wonderful theory, it doesn't quite have the conceptual foundation of general relativity. Our problem in physics is that everything is based on these two different theories and when we put them together we get nonsense.
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