A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature’s Deep Design by Frank Wilczek (PDF)

Description

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.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐We often think of truth as eternal and unyielding—a fact, theory, or model is either true or it is false. We often think of beauty as fleeting and relative—what is beautiful for people in one society may be ugly, revolting, or simply uninteresting in another. In this book, Wilczek claims not only to elevate the status of beauty to that of truth, but to claim that in some sense the most ultimate beauties are at the same time the most ultimate truths. Wilczek is certainly not the first to claim this, and indeed the author traces the idea back to Pythagoras and other classical Greek thinkers. But Wilczek add to the fold the truths of quantum electrodynamics and quantum chromodynamics, as well as general relativity theory.Now this common vision of truth is well known to be overdrawn. Truth is usually provisional, and often only partial. And beauty is not so subjective and culturally-bound after all—consider the ineffable beauty of flowers in a jungle never seen by human eyes but meant to be attractive to pollinators, or the stunning beauty of objects from cultures infinitely far from our own. My own take on the situation is that both truth and beauty are absolute categories. Truth may be partial, but it is never multiple—when two assertions clash, at least one of them is false. And beauty is an ideal category instances of which can be appreciated cross-culturally and across time. Moreover, there are beautiful things that I do not appreciate, and things I appreciate that are not beautiful. So Wilczek’s thesis is not doomed from the start, and I think he does a very good job of defending it.One problem is that the fraction of the human population that can recognize beauty in mathematical equations is quite small. Most people I know hate math, or at least fear it, and many of the people who appreciate mathematical beauty are in other respects quite lacking in aesthetic acuteness. The high marks accorded to this book by reviewers doubtless reflects a strong selection effect. If you don’t like math, you probably won’t get much out of this book.The central message of this book is that beauty is symmetry and the equations of physics can be derived from a small set of symmetry principles. Why this is true, no one knows. Why these particular symmetries instead of countless other possible symmetries, no one knows.Equally important is that the character of our lives is the product of broken symmetries. It is easy to glorify the symmetries and their Apollonian serenity, but the Dionysian world we experience is the ineluctable product of symmetry-breaking. Nor is symmetry-breaking any less beautiful than symmetry itself. Hegel lamented that the perfect serenity of the Ideal is instantiated as the alienated Real, and saw History as the progressive dynamic from Material to Ideal. But it is the broken symmetries that lends meaning and excitement to our lives.Perhaps one of the most pervasive symmetry-breaking comes from quantum mechanics, where every material entity has a wave equation, and the wave equation portrays the entity as in a constant and instantaneous superposition of states. When we observe such an entity, the wave seems to collapse into one determinate state among the myriad of possible states. The wave equation is symmetric but the reality is a broken symmetry. The standard Copenhagen explanation of this is incoherent. as is well known, because the concept of an “observer” is incoherent. The only plausible explanation, to my mind, is the many-worlds interpretation, in which the whole universe is in a high-level superposition of states. When we view a quantum event, we ourselves, as observers, fall into a myriad of superimposed states corresponding to the possible outcomes of the event.But our consciousness is not in a state of superposition! At least mine is not, and when I ask others, they do not report a superposition of states. Thus consciousness is a broken symmetry. How beautiful!

⭐A beautiful question begins naturally by posing a question to the reader – Does the world embody beautiful ideas? With this question in mind nobelaureate Frank Wilczek goes on to discuss beauty in nature and the intellectual history of physics. I found aspects of the book enjoyable and illuminating and there is much that a wide range of readers can learn. That being said the book isn’t that original in concept and seems to have some overlap with “Fearful Symmetry” by Zee. In particular the associating of symmetry and beauty and how nature is defined by symmetries and therefore one should see nature as beautiful is a much discussed idea by admirers of science.The book is primarily split into topics chronologically. The author starts with Pythagoras and gives an extremely elegant proof of the theorem. The author discusses the history of Pythagoras and the myths surrounding the man. He also goes into some music theory and discusses how pleasant sounds are heard when notes whose frequencies are in simple integer ratios are played. The author throughout provides interesting anecdotes about the subject matter being discussed providing the reader with an appreciation of how nature can be beautiful. The author then goes into Plato and aspects of his teachings put beautiful ideas on a pedestal. Properties of platonic solids are discussed as well as Euclid and how the elements was a book structured methodically to reach a final result about the shape and number of platonic solids. The author discusses how ideas about how nature embodies beautiful ideas can often be far off the mark and uses Kepler’s early planetary model to illustrate. The author discusses the limits of human perception in appreciating reality using Plato’s cave as analogy and the author gets into ideas in projective geometry to illustrate how opportunities to appreciate perspective are all around us and waiting to be admired. The author discusses the ideas of Newton in both optics and then dynamics. The author highlights a lot in the history of science and how various instruments gave indications of the nature of the world like the prism for understanding light. The author spends a lot of time on Maxwell as Maxwell wrote probably the most influential work of mathematical physics of all time. Maxwell’s equations are highlighted as how nature embodies beautiful ideas and the author spends some time detailing how electromagnetic waves self-propogate and have a solution whose speed is the speed of light. The details of the discovery of the electromagnetic theory of light are remarkable. The author moves into more modern times and discusses the similarities of quantum mechanics with acoustic wave theory and the normal nodes of strings. The author spends a bit of time on Einstein and how symmetry was at the center of all of his work. The author then spends time on newer fields like quantum chromodynamics; such fields are really unapproachable to a casual reader but the flavor of some of the ideas followed are presented in an interpretable manner. The author finally gets back into symmetry and ends with some of the ideas that have been so important for his career. In particular the author spends time on super symmetry and discusses what makes the theory special and an example of beauty.All in all i found the book reasonably enjoyable with some chapters being quite illuminating. I have to say the book has its down moments as well. I don’t think the organization is particularly great and there seem to be some random parts which don’t achieve much. After reading the book i feel like i understand a few things better but i don’t feel like i will remember the book for anything specific.

⭐Presumably the publishers thought they would save some money by only using monochrome pictures. One can only assume that they had not read the book itself…

⭐Thoroughly enjoyed reading this during my holidays. Be aware that it is fairly erudite in terms of ideas and their connections – especially once it gets into the modern era! But, as a treatise on the incredible complexities of physics and the inescapable conclusion that there is active design in it all, it is well crafted and conceived – as you would expect from a Nobel Prize winner.

⭐A book that makes scientific ideas understandable for the non-specialist. Clear with excellent illustrations. Above all demonstrates the beauty of the world and the beauty of the underlying science.

⭐This book nearly but not quite succeeds as a primer on the great concepts underlying contemporary physics. I lost track during the last quarter of the book but up till then it built some firm foundations for the difficult ideas at the end.

⭐The goal of this book to emphasise the role of symmetry in physical law and why equation of physics are also beautiful.

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