A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature's Deep Design

This is a rumination on beauty in the world. Nobel Laureate Frank Wilczek who is one of the most acclaimed theoretical physicists of his times brings us a chronicle of what beauty in science means. He focuses mainly on physics but does not neglect other sciences. The book is thoughtfully written and is beautifully illustrated with images from art, science and history. It reveals a mind that is as comfortable probing the deep mysteries of the cosmos as it is pondering the everyday objects of our world.Wilczek's approach is roughly chronological and one of his goals is to reveal the seamless unification of beauty in many different contexts. For instance he starts with an account of Pythagoras's theorem which pointed to a crucial connection between numbers and geometric figures. But Pythagoras also discovered simple and pleasing relationships between musical frequencies and the length of various string instruments. Remarkably, these relationships also mirror some of the relationships found in the wavelike nature of subatomic particles. Thus beauty in sound is connected to beauty at the microscopic level. Similarly Wilczek dwells on Goethe's intriguing ruminations on color. While some of these ruminations were scientifically flawed, Wilczek explores how they connect to our modern understanding of color based on the physics and biology of vision.It is when Wilczek starts talking about beauty in physics that he is really in his element. How does one define beauty in science in general and physics in particular? As we all know, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but Wilczek convincingly provides some criteria that have guided physicists' search for this elusive but still familiar concept through the ages. One very important criterion is symmetry, and Wilczek tells us how assumptions of symmetry in equations and the behavior of subatomic particles underlie almost every concept of modern physics, from relativity to the Higgs boson. The second criterion is economy: many of the most profound equations of physics can fit on a napkin. The third is unification which, as pointed out before, leads to pleasing similarities between the mundane (musical sound, color) and the deep (cosmology, quantum mechanics) as well as between many branches of physics itself. In fact Wilczek's account demonstrates why the mundane is actually deeper than we think. Stunning examples of unification in physics include Maxwell's marriage of electricity with magnetism and Einstein's marriage of space with time.The later parts of the book which talk about concepts like the standard model of particle physics, gauge symmetry, Noether's theorem and quantum electrodynamics can get a bit hairy, but even if you are not a physicist you can still appreciate how these concepts embody the core concepts of beauty that Wilczek mentions. Things get a bit trickier when Wilczek starts talking about complex systems which cannot be pithily described with simple equations. These systems are more amenable to models than fundamental laws, and the challenges of defining beauty in such cases is illustrated by a collaboration Wilczek had with a fellow scientist in which a model that they came up with had so many moving parts that ultimately it was hard to see where exactly one could search for beauty or elegance in the construction. This discussion tantalizingly hints at the existence of so-called emergent systems like the weather, the stock market and consciousness which are not reducible to the sum of their individual parts. I would have appreciated a more detailed discussion of beauty in the context of these systems since science is likely going to focus more on them in the upcoming years.Nevertheless, this is a fine meld of ruminations on beauty across science, art, music and many other aspects of the human and natural world. Wilczek is a clear guide on this journey, and although he may not answer all our questions on beauty, he certainly makes us question and think, which should be the hallmark of a good teacher. Almost two hundred years ago John Keats said, "Beauty is truth, truth is beauty." Wilczek shows us how Keats's utterance is largely true.

This is a broad, deep and mind-expanding book by a Nobel prize winning physicist covering many topics—the philosophy of Plato of the link between the nature of reality and the beauty of form, the functioning and limitations of the human sensory perception of electromagnetic waves (light) and of hydrodynamic waves (sound) relative to what is actually out there to be “seen” and “heard”, the history of science from the Greeks to the Standard Model (or Core Theory as preferred by Wilczek), the extraordinary relation between physical reality and mathematics (numbers, geometry, symmetry), the relation of beauty in the form of symmetry to physical reality, the ongoing extensions of the Core Theory using Supersymmetry. Supersymmetry (SUSY for the cogniscenti) is a form of mathematical magic that has particles being changed from one thing in one “property space” to another in another “property space” and with transformations that change quantum dimensions into ordinary dimensions without changing the laws of physics. The fallback position when things don’t agree with observation is to postulate that the equations have many solutions and the solutions that have the sought-after symmetry are unstable.Wilczec’s description of his and others’ efforts to extend The Standard Model, or as he prefers it The Core Theory, particularly around page 300, strongly calls to mind “The Glass Bead Game (German: Das Glasperlenspiel) is the last full-length novel of the German author Hermann Hesse. It was begun in 1931 and published in Switzerland in 1943 after being rejected for publication in Germany due to Hesse's anti-Fascist views.[1] The Glass Bead Game takes place at an unspecified date centuries into the future. Hesse suggested that he imagined the book's narrator writing around the start of the 25th century.[4] The setting is a fictional province of central Europe called Castalia, which was reserved by political decision for the life of the mind; technology and economic life are kept to a strict minimum. Castalia is home to an austere order of intellectuals with a twofold mission: to run boarding schools for boys, and to nurture and play the Glass Bead Game, whose exact nature remains elusive and whose devotees occupy a special school within Castalia known as Waldzell. The rules of the game are only alluded to—they are so sophisticated that they are not easy to imagine. Playing the game well requires years of hard study of music, mathematics, and cultural history. The game is essentially an abstract synthesis of all arts and sciences. It proceeds by players making deep connections between seemingly unrelated topics”.(from Wikipedia). This impression of similarity is reinforced by Wilczec’s ode to various elementary particles as avatars of corresponding symmetries on page 241.Wilczek’s book is well written, beautifully illustrated with images from the worlds of art and physics, and informative in the extreme. Not everyone will be able to follow everything, depending on their training in modern physics and fortitude, but everyone will be able to glean something from it about the search for physical reality over the years and about the world of modern physics.