A Beautiful Question Quotes

“Two obsessions are the hallmarks of Nature's artistic style:

Symmetry- a love of harmony, balance, and proportion

Economy- satisfaction in producing an abundance of effects from very limited means”
― Frank Wilczek, A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature's Deep Design

“Transient and Eternal

The state of the world is in flux, and every object within it is subject to change.

Concepts live outside of time and, because All Things Are Number, liberate us from it.”
― Frank Wilczek, A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature's Deep Design

“Supersymmetry, if correct, will be a profound new embodiment of beauty in the world. Because the transformations of supersymmetry turn substance particles into force particles, and vice versa, supersymmetry can explain, based on symmetry, why neither of those things can exist without the other: Both are the same thing, seen from different perspectives. Supersymmetry reconciles apparent opposites, in the spirit of yin-yang.”
― Frank Wilczek, A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature's Deep Design

“Thus far our meditation on quantum reality has revealed that the world of everyday matter, when properly understood, embodies concepts of extraordinary beauty. Indeed, ordinary matter is built up from atoms that are, in a rich and precise sense, tiny musical instruments. In their interplay with light, they realize a mathematical Music of the Spheres that surpasses the visions of Pythagoras, Plato, and Kepler. In molecules and ordered materials, those atomic instruments play together as harmonious ensembles and synchronized orchestras.”
― Frank Wilczek, A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature's Deep Design

“Yet it is beautiful to discover that there's another chapter to the story, where we discover deep unity beneath, and supporting, the diversity of appearance. All colors are one thing, seen in different states of motion. That is science's brilliantly poetic answer to Keats's complaint that science "unweaves a rainbow.”
― Frank Wilczek, A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature's Deep Design

“Mythic Background

Describing his approach to science, Einstein said something that sounds distinctly prescientific, and hearkens back to those ancient Greeks he admired:

What really interests me is whether God had any choice in the creation of the world.

Einstein's suggestion that God-or a world-making Artisan-might not have choices would have scandalized Newton or Maxwell. It fits very well, however, with the Pythagorean search for universal harmony, or with Plato's concept of a changeless Ideal.

If the Artisan had no choice: Why not? What might constrain a world-making Artisan?

One possibility arises if the Artisan is at heart an artist. Then the constraint is desire for beauty. I'd like to (and do) infer that Einstein thought along the line of our Question-Does the world embody beautiful ideas?-and put his faith in the answer "yes!"

Beauty is a vague concept. But so, to begin with, were concepts like "force" and "energy." Through dialogue with Nature, scientists learned to refine the meaning of "force" and "energy," to bring their use into line with important aspects of reality.

So too, by studying the Artisan's handiwork, we evolve refined concepts of "symmetry," and ultimately of "beauty"-concepts that reflect important aspects of reality, while remaining true to the spirit of their use in common language.”
― Frank Wilczek, A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature's Deep Design

“In short: the space of color information is infinite-dimensional, but we perceive, as color, only a three-dimensional surface, onto which those infinite dimensions project.”
― Frank Wilczek, A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature's Deep Design

“With this, in a powerful sense, our Question has been answered. The world, insofar as we speak of the world of Chemistry, biology, astrophysics, engineering, and everyday life, does embody beautiful ideas. The Core, which governs those domains, is profoundly rooted in concepts of symmetry and geometry, as we have seen. And it works its will, in quantum theory, through music-like rules. Symmetry really does determine structure. A pure and perfect Music of the Spheres really does animate the soul of reality. Plato and Pythagoras: We salute you!”
― Frank Wilczek, A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature's Deep Design

“Energy-momentum tells the metric fluid how to flow.
The metric fluid tells energy-momentum how to flow.
Electric charge tells the electromagnetic fluid how to flow.
The electromagnetic fluid tells electric charge how to flow.
Weak charge tells the weak fluid how to flow.
The weak fluid tells weak charge how to flow.
Strong charge tells the strong fluid how to flow.
The strong fluid tells strong charge how to flow.”
― Frank Wilczek, A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature's Deep Design

“Dynamical beauty transcends specific objects and phenomena, and invites us to imagine the expanse of possibilities. For example, the sizes and shapes of actual planetary orbits are not simple. They are neither the (compounded) circles of Aristotle, Ptolemy, and Nicolaus Copernicus, nor even the more nearly accurate ellipses of Kepler, but rather curves that must be calculated numerically, as functions of time, evolving in complicated ways that depend on the positions and masses of the Sun and the other planets. There is great beauty and simplicity here, but it is only fully evident when we understand the deep design. The appearance of particular objects does not exhaust the beauty of the laws.”
― Frank Wilczek, A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature's Deep Design

“If an energetic and powerful Creator made the world, it could be that what moved Him—or Her, or Them, or It—to create was precisely an impulse to make something beautiful.”
― Frank Wilczek, A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature's Deep Design

“The world offers many possibilities for different sensory universes, which support very different interpretations of the world's significance. In this way our so-called Universe is already very much a multiverse.”
― Frank Wilczek, A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature's Deep Design

“Gravitons are the avatars of general covariance.

Photons are the avatars of gauge symmetry 1.0.

Weakons are the avatars of gauge symmetry 2.0.

Color gluons are the avatars of gauge symmetry 3.0.”
― Frank Wilczek, A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature's Deep Design

“For us, the great conclusion is this: all the colors can be obtained from any one of them, by motion, or, as we say, by making Galilean transformations. Because Galilean transformations are symmetries of the laws of Nature, any color is fully equivalent to any other. They all emerge as different views of the same thing, seen from different but equally valid perspectives.”
― Frank Wilczek, A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature's Deep Design

“A quantum atom with two electrons is a much more complicated object to visualize, and I'm not aware that it's ever been done very well. The challenge is that for each possible position of one electron, the wave function of the other is a different three-dimensional object. So really, the natural home of the total wave function, for the two-electron system, is a space of 3 + 3 = 6 dimensions. It is quite a challenge to present such an object in a way that human brains find meaningful.”
― Frank Wilczek, A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature's Deep Design

“Yet many creative spirits have found inspiration in the idea that the Creator might be, among other things, an artist whose esthetic motivations we can appreciate and share-or even, in daring speculation, that the Creator is primarily a creative artist. Such spirits have engaged our Question, in varied and evolving forms, across many centuries. Thus inspired, they have produced deep philosophy, great science, compelling literature, and striking imagery. Some have produced works that combine several, or all, of those features. These works are a vein of gold running back through our civilization.”
― Frank Wilczek, A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature's Deep Design

“Subtle is the Lord, but malicious She is not.”
― Frank Wilczek, A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature's Deep Design

“We can roll up two-dimensional graphene to make one-dimensional tubes, the so-called nanotubes. This can be done in many ways, giving nanotubes with different radii and pitches (see plate FF). Nanotubes that differ only slightly in geometry can have radically different physical properties. It is a triumph of quantum theory that these delicate properties can be predicted unambiguously, purely through calculation, and that they agree with experimental measurements.”
― Frank Wilczek, A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature's Deep Design

“So graphene makes an extremely strong, tough material. At the same time, because it is only one atomic layer thick, a graphene sheet is light and flexible. In explaining their 2010 award, the Nobel committee mentioned that a one-square meter graphene hammocck could support a cat, while weighing about as much as one of the cat's whiskers.”
― Frank Wilczek, A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature's Deep Design

“Graphene has unique mechanical and electrical properties, which promise many applications. Inspired by graphene's promise, people have figured out some considerably more efficient ways to make it! One optimistic, but maybe not crazy, study forecasts that a 100 billion market in graphene will develop over the next few years.”
― Frank Wilczek, A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature's Deep Design

“Gravitons are the avatars of general covariance.”
― Frank Wilczek, A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature's Deep Design

“Total energy, which is the conserved quantity, is the sum of several terms: kinetic energy, mass energy, potential energy, and field energy. Those different terms refer to aspects of reality that seem, on the face of it, quite different. Much of the power of the concept of energy, in applications, comes precisely from its ability to describe, and relate, several different aspects of reality.”
― Frank Wilczek, A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature's Deep Design

“The facts that so impressed Newton-that the planets all orbit in roughly the same plane (the ecliptic) and in the same direction-reflect their role as repositories of angular momentum, spun off as the original gas cloud condensed. Other features reflect the long influence of history, wearing down the rough edges, so to speak. The fact that the same side of our Moon always faces Earth is one such feature: rotation of the Moon would raise powerful tides, which act as friction. Presumably, in the distant past, there was such a rotation, but it has been damped out. (For similar reasons, the length of Earth days is increasing. Geological records, which show daily fluctuations in tidal deposits, indicate that during the Cambrian era, 650 million years ago, days were roughly twenty-one hours long.)”
― Frank Wilczek, A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature's Deep Design

“If not through divine supervision, how do the atoms of modern chemistry, with their exactly reproducible, stable properties, emerge from equations that, fundamentally, are equations for change?”
― Frank Wilczek, A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature's Deep Design

“The human mind is our ultimate sense organ. Mind has discovered that there are invisible infinities hidden in light. Our perception of color projects the doubly infinite-dimensional space of physical color onto the three-dimensional wall of our inner Cave.”
― Frank Wilczek, A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature's Deep Design

“Thus the electromagnetic information entering our eyes at each image point is infinite-dimensional twice over, because for each spectral color there are two possible polarizations, each of which can occur with an independent strength. Human vision overlooks that doubling because human eyes cannot distinguish between different polarizations of light.”
― Frank Wilczek, A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature's Deep Design

“Ordinary space is a three dimensional continuum, and so is the space of perceived colors.”
― Frank Wilczek, A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature's Deep Design

“Different kinds of gases (e.g., gases based on different chemical elements) absorb different spectral colors. So if one has a gas of unknown composition, one can deduce what it's made of by seeing what light it absorbs! In the language of our generalized chemistry, the message of Fraunhofer's dark lines, as interpreted by Bunsen and Kirchhoff, is that a given atom of substance will combine with-that is, absorb-only specific elements of light-that is, spectral colors-while ignoring others. There is also a converse effect, that heated gas will emit light in preferential colors, creating bright lines in the spectrum. Altogether, these dark and bright lines are like fingerprints identifying the responsible substances.”
― Frank Wilczek, A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature's Deep Design

“In the more advanced, modern parts of physics we learn that light itself is a form of matter, and indeed that matter in general, when understood deeply, is remarkably light-like. So again, our interest in and experience with light, which is deeply rooted in our essential nature, proves fortunate.”
― Frank Wilczek, A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature's Deep Design

“But we can expect the language history of the world to be revealing in another way. A language community is not just a group marked out by its use of a particular language: it is an evolving communion in its own right, whose particular view of the world is informed by a common language tradition. A language brings with it a mass of perceptions, cliches, judgments and inspirations. In some sense, then, when one language replaces another, a people's view of the world must also be changing.”
― Frank Wilczek, A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature's Deep Design