“To create something beautiful, concludes Nobel laureate physicist Frank Wilczek in his relentlessly engaging new book, A Beautiful Question. “Many motivations have been ascribed to the Creator,” he points out, “but artist ambition is rarely prominent among them.””
“The beautiful question the book considers, stated simply, is this: “Does the world embody beautiful ideas?” The answer is an emphatic yes: “You bet it does,” Wilczek writes. “And so do you.””
“What is the meaning of “beautiful”? Physics is pretty clear on the issue, and Wilczek makes the argument deeper, broader, and far more colorful (literally and figuratively) than ever before: it is harmony, balance, and above all symmetry, the core of artistry.”
“In physics, symmetries underlie every fundamental law, because symmetries reveal the deep truths often hidden behind superficial differences. Energy and matter are two sides of a coin, as are space and time, electricity and magnetism, waves and particles. Symmetries are differences that don’t make a difference. If you rotate a snowflake by 60 degrees it doesn’t make a difference; it looks the same. If you rotate it by 65 degrees, then you’ve broken the symmetry. You can rotate a circle by any amount and it doesn’t make a difference.”
“Understanding these “terms of art,” as he calls them in a rich compendium of key concepts attached to the end of the book (a bit like dessert), provides the tools we need to see the beautiful scaffolding behind the sometimes messy facade of our universe.”
“Wilczek circles back at the end of his book to a deep kind of symmetry, called complementarity, the guiding principle of his special hero Niels Bohr, who is known as the father of quantum mechanics. Not only were multiple perspectives essential for Bohr, but Bohr also saw great philosophical truths in the idea that the multiple perspectives needed to understand the world were often mutually exclusive. A wave cannot be a particle, and yet, at the quantum level, it is (and vice versa). You are nothing but a collection of particles and light; you are a thinking, feeling human being. The opposite of a shallow truth is false, Bohr was often quoted as saying, but the opposite of a deep truth is also true.”