From the Bookshelf of Science and Inquiry…

A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature's Deep Design

Frank Wilczek

Start date: May 1, 2025

Finish date: May 31, 2025

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Book Club 2025

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Oct 07, 2015 David Rubenstein rated it it was amazing

Shelves: physics

The beautiful question is, whether the laws of physics are based on beauty; are they simple, symmetric, proportioned and economical. Wilczek is a Nobel-Prize winner in physics. Regardless of whether physics is based on beauty, Wilczek has written a beautiful book. His style of writing is excellent, and the book is graced with plenty of engrossing diagrams and color illustrations.

The earliest astronomers tried to make the orbits of the planets simpler than they actually are. They tried to make th The beautiful question is, whether the laws of physics are based on beauty; are they simple, symmetric, proportioned and economical. Wilczek is a Nobel-Prize winner in physics. Regardless of whether physics is based on beauty, Wilczek has written a beautiful book. His style of writing is excellent, and the book is graced with plenty of engrossing diagrams and color illustrations.

The earliest astronomers tried to make the orbits of the planets simpler than they actually are. They tried to make their orbits fit into the so-called Platonic solids. Then they tried to make their orbits fit into circles. When observations did not fit this idea, they made circles upon circles, and unnecessary complicated the orbits. It wasn't until Newton saw that gravity affects both objects on Earth as well as the planets, that the orbits could be determined from a simple physical law. The law states that gravitation is proportional to the masses of the objects and inversely proportional to the square of their distance.

Wilczek traces the idea of symmetry into all of the realms of physics; special and general relativity, electro-magnetism, and quantum mechanics. He shows how Maxwell completed his famous set of equations by assuming a degree of symmetry, and correctly found that electromagnetic waves travel at the speed of light. To this day, Maxwell's equations serve as the basic laws of electricity and magnetism.

My favorite chapter is about Emmy Noether, a mathematician with deep insights into physics. She was discriminated against because she was a woman, so she worked without pay. As the Nazis came to power, she emigrated to the United States. She proved a remarkable theorem; each law of conservation in physics can be derived from a basic concept of symmetry. So, for example, she showed why there are a basic laws of conservation of energy and momentum; she showed that it these laws are equivalent to stating that the laws of physics are invariant in time and space. Wilczek calls this the most profound idea in all of physics. And many prominent mathematicians and physicists have said that Noether was the most important of all women mathematicians.

Toward the end of the book, Wilczek describes the alphabet soup of fundamental particles. He shows the symmetries in their existence and properties, in certain respects. However, many of the particles do not really abide by symmetries, though this may simply be because of our present-day lack of full understanding. ...more

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Sep 27, 2015 Charlene rated it really liked it

Shelves: physics, general-science, constructs, chaos-complexity-emergence

This book, at its core is about beauty in nature and the power of that beauty to serve as a criterion for determining if a theory is true. Can we use beauty as a guide to discover the laws of the universe? It's a great question. Wilczek points out the trouble the beauty criterion has caused from time to time, e.g. Kepler's beautiful, but wrong, theory about planetary orbits. In the end, Wilczek thinks beauty is a reliable indicator of reality.

The book reads like poetry and Wilczek is equally ar This book, at its core is about beauty in nature and the power of that beauty to serve as a criterion for determining if a theory is true. Can we use beauty as a guide to discover the laws of the universe? It's a great question. Wilczek points out the trouble the beauty criterion has caused from time to time, e.g. Kepler's beautiful, but wrong, theory about planetary orbits. In the end, Wilczek thinks beauty is a reliable indicator of reality.

The book reads like poetry and Wilczek is equally artists and physicist. He takes his reader back to the group of ancient thinkers, who are collectively known as Pythagoras and examines the symmetry and beauty in Pythagoras' Theorem. Looking at consonance and dissonance, he illustrates how the inner ear recognizes beauty as symmetry, e.g. we like a perfect fifths because our neurons like the beautiful math. Thus maybe math *is* beauty. Maybe the laws of nature *are* beauty.

Wilczek also describes the beauty of optics and of Newtonian physics in general. He provides a history of its shortcomings, which helps him usher in the beauty of Maxwell's equations, relativity, and quantum theory. His explanation of the standard model is wonderful and a good primer for those who are not familiar with the various particles.

Symmetry, and more importantly the breaking of symmetry -- from the Higgs nonzero field through the matter the Higgs creates, and onto the fractal nature of the many forms that matter takes -- seems to Wilczek to be fundamental to our universe. This is why the laws themselves would be expected to be beautiful in this way. I would have liked for him to talk more about networks, chaos, emergence, scaling and the like.

I would suggest readers who liked this book and wanted to keep thinking about these should read:

- Ian Stewart's Fearful Symmetry
- Lisa Randall's Warped Passages
- Geoffrey West's Scaling in Biology
- Albert-László Barabási's Linked
- John Kricher's Ecological Planet (One review called this basic. It is no longer basic when looked at through the lens of networks and complex emerging systems)
- Falkowski's Life's Engines
- Strogatz's Sync
- Scharf's Gravity's Engines
- Carroll's Particle at the End of the Universe
- Holmes' Secret Life of Dust
- Gleick's Chaos ...more

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