A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature's Deep Design
Frank Wilczek
Language: English
Pages: 448
ISBN: 0143109367
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Does the universe embody beautiful ideas?
Artists as well as scientists throughout human history have pondered this “beautiful question.” With Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek as your guide, embark on a voyage of related discoveries, from Plato and Pythagoras up to the present. Wilczek’s groundbreaking work in quantum physics was inspired by his intuition to look for a deeper order of beauty in nature. This is the deep logic of the universe—and it is no accident that it is also at the heart of what we find aesthetically pleasing and inspiring.
Wilczek is hardly alone among great scientists in charting his course using beauty as his compass. As he reveals in A Beautiful Question, this has been the heart of scientific pursuit from Pythagoras and the ancient belief in the music of the spheres to Galileo, Newton, Maxwell, Einstein, and into the deep waters of twentieth-century physics. Wilczek brings us right to the edge of knowledge today, where the core insights of even the craziest quantum ideas apply principles we all understand. The equations for atoms and light are almost the same ones that govern musical instruments and sound; the subatomic particles that are responsible for most of our mass are determined by simple geometric symmetries.
Gorgeously illustrated, A Beautiful Question is a mind-shifting book that braids the age-old quest for beauty and the age-old quest for truth into a thrilling synthesis. It is a dazzling and important work from one of our best thinkers, whose humor and infectious sense of wonder animate every page. Yes: The world is a work of art, and its deepest truths are ones we already feel, as if they were somehow written in our souls.
Praise for A Beautiful Question:
“An expertly curated tour across 2,500 years of philosophy and physics . . . [Frank Wilczek] has accomplished a rare feat: Writing a book of profound humanity based on questions aimed directly at the eternal.” —The Wall Street Journal
“Both a brilliant exploration of largely uncharted territories and a refreshingly idiosyncratic guide to developments in particle physics.” —Nature
“Inspiring and remarkably accessible . . . Wilczek’s language is lyrical and almost mystical. . . . Whatever the answer Nature will ultimately give us, we have the pleasure of engaging with an enlightened and humble mind.” —The Chronicle of Higher Education
calculate how the frequency of vibration of a string changes as we vary its length or tension. Using those equations, we find that the frequency falls proportionally to the length, and rises proportionally to the square root of the tension. Therefore Pythagoras’s rules, translated into frequency, both make the same simple statement. They both state that notes sound good together if their frequencies are in ratios of small whole numbers. A THEORY OF HARMONY Now let us resume our story, at
youtube.com/watch?v=fTlbVLGBm3Q. Here “simple” has a definite technical meaning: Two references mentioned earlier, www.youtube.com/watch?v=mitioODQYgI and http://www.mathopenref.com/trigsinewaves.html, are relevant here again. I will add here two classics of acoustics by master physicists: On the Sensations of Tone, by H. Helmholtz, and Theory of Sound, by Lord Rayleigh. Both are available free online, and also in attractive Dover editions. RECOMMENDED READING This is a brief list
W particles, 263, 265, 266, 319, 337, 394 See also weakons X-rays, 135, 347, 356, plate P Yang, C. N. (Frank), 165, 261–62, 334, 335, 375 Yang-Mills equations, 240, 249, 263, 298–99, 334, 396 yin-yang complementarity, 235–36, 237, 324–25, 324fig., plate A See also complementarity “Young Archimedes” (Huxley), 22 Zee, Anthony, 403n Zeno’s paradoxes, 58–59, 107–8, 107fig., 340 zero-mass particles, 263, 265–66, 270, 271, 272 zero-point motion, 305, 342,
relatively simple story that is a severe idealization of the actual history. In history, unlike in the deep structure of Nature, Real and Ideal differ greatly. A wise teacher—Father Jim Malley, SJ—gifted me this valuable pearl: “It is more blessed to ask forgiveness than permission.”) One involves light; the other involves atoms. Light comes in lumps. This is demonstrated in the photoelectric effect, as we’ll discuss momentarily. It came as a shock to physicists. After Maxwell’s
Heisenberg) came up with his equation, it was so obviously superior, and even so “obviously right,” that it more or less immediately emerged as the consensus, and quickly evolved into modern quantum theory. And judging from its overwhelming, continuing success, Nature seems to like quantum theory too. It’s more musical! The process that replaces quantum jumps is especially interesting. In it, the electron gives birth to electromagnetic energy, in the form of a photon, where initially