Frank Wilczek is a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, and the question he asks is, "Does the world embody beautiful ideas?" Not surprisingly for a physicist, his answer is "a resounding Yes!"
The title and the theme of this "meditation" suggest a New Age-y approach, and the cover has a blurb from Deepak Chopra to complete the impression. However, Wilczek's hard science background keeps his speculations grounded in fact. The book discusses Pythagoras, Plato, Newton, and Maxwell before plunging into his specialty of quantum theory. His aesthetics for theories comes down to one principle above all: symmetry.
I wasn't particularly captured by Wilczek's question nor his attempts to answer it. However, I was very intrigued with his unconventional (idiosyncratic?) presentation of the theories of gravity and electromagnetism. I feel like I understand them in a new way, and that I even made progress toward conceptualizing the crazy world of quantum theory. It's all fluids!
No comments:
Post a Comment