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Quantum Physics Is on the Wrong Track, Says Breakthrough Prize Winner
After netting the world’s highest-paying science award, preeminent theoretical physicist Gerard ’t Hooft reflects on his legacy and the future of physics
The theoretical physicist, now a professor emeritus at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, has spent much of the past five decades reshaping our understanding of the fundamental forces that knit together reality. His most celebrated discovery—the one that earned him, along with his former Ph.D. thesis adviser, the late Martinus Veltman, the 1999 Nobel Prize in Physics —showed how to make sense of non-Abelian gauge theories, which are complex mathematical frameworks that describe how elementary particles interact. So, you put forth a provocative theoretical insight more than 30 years ago, and it has somehow led to the world’s richest man seriously suggesting on a popular podcast that “we are most likely” all just avatars in some cosmic-scale video game.
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