A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature's Deep Design

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.

Unbelievably mind-blowing read for a non-scientist! What an engrossing, stimulating, captivating book to have the privilege to read from a leading genius in this enigmatic field! One instantly comes to LOVE this book and its author for how beautifully and compassionatly he shares his take on the shocking and profound realities of the universe. A must-read for any artist, any human.

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.

I graduated in Physics fifty years ago, a great deal has happened since then. I'm often barely able to follow Professor Wilczek's arguments, sometimes dazzled by the brilliancy of his ideas. But I fully agree with the writer 'statement that the physical world embodies beauty, which amounts to the same thing that biologist Richard Dawkins calls the Magic of Reality. Nevertheless, this book leaves me with mixed feelings: I cannot decide what kind of readers it was written for. Equations are often named, but never spelled. This means that Prof. Wilczek thinks that the reader is, either: 1. Unable to read a differential equation ' 'dumb' in math and physics. As such, unable to understand a single word of what goes on pages 169 and onwards of this book. 2. A guy that already knows these equations by heart, that is, a physicist. To him, this book appears mainly as an apology of the author's ideas on what he calls the Core theory, aka the standard model. This indecision itches my cortex. Ah, a small matter. Prof. Wilczek version of Einstein's demonstration of the Pythagorean theorem. Of course, when the length of a closed figure is increased by x, its area increases by x². But I do not believe that this statement is enough to deduce that the area of a right triangle is proportional to the square of its hypotenuse. I rather think that first a very simple geometric construction is needed to show that the area of any triangle is equal to its base multiplied by half the corresponding height. And next that, if we call 'h' the value of the hypotenuse and ''' the lesser angle of the triangle, a simple bit of trigonometry applied to a drawing of the triangle and its circumscribed circle allows us to know that the area of the triangle may be written as (h².sin2')/4; at least, proportional to the square of its hypotenuse. Elementary, Dr. Watson, but it mars the terseness of Prof. Wilczek's proof.

The book includes pictures (establisbed in 2 different sections referred as Plates) which are important in conveying the information and the insights Frank Wilczek poseses in himself. They are referenced and explained througout the entire text and which were supposed to be printed in colour. But interestingly and sadly they are all printed in black and white. Penguin Books sold in Turkey. Did anyone expreince the same problem in another country I wonder. This is some kind of a neglicient behaviour one does not expect from Penguin Books🎈

Frank Wilczek ist theoretischer Physiker am MIT, 2004 erhielt er gemeinsam mit David Gross und David Politzer den Nobelpreis für seine Arbeiten zum Verständnis der asymptotischen Freiheit von stark wechselwirkenden Teilchen. Sein neues Buch „A Beautiful Question“ behandelt in allgemein verständlicher Weise die Grundlagen, Entwicklung und Eleganz des Standard Modells der Elementarteilchen Theorie – die der Autor lieber Core Theory nennt –, dabei dient der Aspekte der Schönheit von Theorien Wilczek als eine Art roten Faden, er nennt sein Buch eine lange Meditation über eine große Frage: „Does the world embody beautiful ideas?“ Der Autor ist nicht der erste, der physikalische Theorien mit den Kategorien Schönheit und Eleganz in Verbindung bringt -- Albert Einstein, Paul Dirac und Steven Weinberg äußerten sich ähnlich über ihre Entdeckungen. Jedenfalls erlaubt dieser Blickwickel dem Autor, die Highlights der Geschichte großer Theorien und Entdeckungen schlaglichtartig Revue passieren zu lassen – er skizziert die Ideen von Pythagoras, Plato, Kepler, Newton, Maxwell und Einstein, um schließlich auf die Schönheiten der Quantenwelt zu sprechen zu kommen. Die Quantenmechanik sorgt nicht nur für die dynamische Stabilität von Atomen, sie bringt auch Ordnung in den 'Zoo' der Elementarteilchen. Eine der wichtigsten Ausdrucksformen von Schönheit in der Physik sind Symmetrien (vgl. auch Weinberg: Dreams of a final Theory), sie stehen gemäß dem Noetherschen Theorem mit Erhaltungsgrößen in enger Beziehung, treffen also mitten ins Herz dieser Theorien. Das Ordnungs- Prinzip der 'Core Theory' sind lokale Symmetrien, einer Idee die auf Hermann Weyl zurückgeht und die von Yang und Mills wieder aufgegriffen wurde, die die Wechselwirkungs- Felder bzw. Teichen bestimmen. Dem Autor gelingt es die spannenden Einsichten, die sich damit für die elektromagnetische, starke und schwache Wechselwirkung ergeben, interessant aber auch allgemein verständlich zu beschreiben, er bemüht dazu Analogien und verwendet gelegentlich auch Metaphern aus dem künstlerischen Bereich, die unter anderem auch von den ausgezeichneten Farbtafeln unterstützt werden; die Erläuterungen geraten aber nie übersimplifiziert. Das Buch ist eine wundervoll Synthese von moderner Physik und Betrachtungen über die den Theorie tief zugrundeliegenden Prinzipien, die – so immer wieder die Erkenntnis – schön sind. Es ist also kein Wunder, dass die Antwort auf die eingangs gestellte zentrale Frage als eindeutiges JA ausfällt. Das Standard Modell hat bisher alle Überprüfungen mit Bravour bestanden – 2012 wurde schließlich sogar das Higgs Boson durch Experimente am LHC gefunden; trotzdem bleiben noch viele Fragen offen. Im letzten Teil des Buches bespricht Wilczek einige -- noch spekulative -- Erweiterungen, darunter eine völlig neue Art von Symmetrie, der Supersymmetrie zwischen den Teilchenarten der Fermionen und Bosonen; noch gibt es dafür noch keine Belege, aber Frank Wilczek ist Optimist, die Zeittafel im Anhang endet mit seiner Wette auf die Entdeckung der Supersymmetrie am LHC bis zum Ende des Jahres 2020. Das Buch ist exzellent geschrieben, streift viele spannende Aspekte moderner Theorien, spielt mit der Phantasie und ist zudem noch liebevoll ausgestattet; der fast 100 seitige Anhang enthält neben der Zeittafel, mit den Daten wichtiger Erkenntnisse, ein umfangreiches Glossar (Terms of Art), einen Abschnitt mit technischen Bemerkungen zum Text und eine sorgfältig ausgewählte Liste mit weiterführende Leseempfehlungen.

The layout of book is well done with a good sized print and well spaced para's The content of the book is , for me, difficult: but Wilcek writes in a way to interest a wider audience and thus hopefully some of it will penetrate! The presentation of this book is really lovely and such a pleasure to handle. I was interested to read this after hearing him talk on 'Private Passions' .

The book does justice to it's title.It covers Greek Mathematics and Philosophy, through Classical Physics to modern Physics . Written by a noble prize winner in Physics, it presents thinking in these areas for the last more than two millenia ( axial period to twenty first century ) in chronogical order and in a novel perspective, beautifully presenting their beauty .