By AIDA EDEMARIAM - GUARDIAN.CO.UK
Added: Fri, 23 Oct 2009 23:00:00 UTC

Thanks to Michael for the link.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2009/oct/24/michael-green-new-lucasian-professor

Michael Green is the new Lucasian chair of mathematics at Cambridge – following in the footsteps of Newton and Hawking. So does the pioneer of string theory think he holds the answers to life's mysteries?


The history of scientific discovery has an alternate history of ifs, many quite quotidian: if the apple had not fallen on Newton's head, if Archimedes hadn't overfilled his bath … And if Michael Green, visiting from London, had not wandered into the canteen at Cern in Switzerland and bumped into John Schwarz, visiting from California, string theory, which for the last couple of decades has been touted as the most likely route to the holy grail of physics – a theory of everything – would not now exist.

Though Green, who talks very fast, eyes searching my face for signs of comprehension, is not self-aggrandising enough to put it like that. In younger pictures he has a passing resemblance to Harrison Ford; though there are more lines, and his hair has whitened, he is ageing well. He and Schwarz followed their coffee with a month of chats. Nothing came of them, but they quite enjoyed themselves, so they met again, the next year, and the next. These days the field is so competitive that any unsolved problem is pounced on immediately; then it was possible to be more leisurely, to work on other projects, teach students, travel.

"We were both bachelors at the time," Schwarz says, on the phone from California. "We had no responsibilities other than academic responsibilities. So we could devote ourselves pretty singlemindedly to this work."

They began spending summers together at the Aspen Centre for Physics in Colorado, sharing a flat, going to movies, on long hikes – "lots of people in the subject walk," says Green – and talking all the while.

Then in 1984, "there was a moment, a day," says Green, "which I remember well, when suddenly everything fell into place at once. We were working on a particular aspect which we hoped – there was no reason to expect it to, but we secretly hoped – would work. And it did. But immediately, within a couple of hours, something else worked, which went far beyond that. And that was totally unexpected."
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2009/oct/24/michael-green-new-lucasian-professor

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