A Beautiful Question

Finding Nature's Deep Design

By: Frank Wilczek

Narrated by: Frank Wilczek

Does the universe embody beautiful ideas?

Artists as well as scientists throughout human history have pondered this "beautiful question". With Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek as your guide, embark on a voyage of related discoveries, from Plato and Pythagoras up to the present. Wilczek's groundbreaking work in quantum physics was inspired by his intuition to look for a deeper order of beauty in nature. In fact, every major advance in his career came from this intuition: to assume that the universe embodies beautiful forms, forms whose hallmarks are symmetry - harmony, balance, proportion - and economy. There are other meanings of "beauty", but this is the deep logic of the universe - and it is no accident that it is also at the heart of what we find aesthetically pleasing and inspiring.

Wilczek is hardly alone among great scientists in charting his course using beauty as his compass. As he reveals in A Beautiful Question, this has been the heart of scientific pursuit from Pythagoras, the ancient Greek who was the first to argue that "all things are number", to Galileo, Newton, Maxwell, Einstein, and into the deep waters of 20th century physics. Though the ancients weren't right about everything, their ardent belief in the music of the spheres has proved true down to the quantum level. Indeed, Wilczek explores just how intertwined our ideas about beauty and art are with our scientific understanding of the cosmos.

Wilczek brings us right to the edge of knowledge today, where the core insights of even the craziest quantum ideas apply principles we all understand. The equations for atoms and light are almost literally the same equations that govern musical instruments and sound; the subatomic particles that are responsible for most of our mass are determined by simple geometric symmetries. The universe itself, suggests Wilczek, seems to want to embody beautiful and elegant forms.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2015 Frank Wilczek (P)2015 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

“Mr. Wilczek takes the reader on an expertly curated tour across 2,500 years of philosophy and physics.... One of the great pleasures of Mr. Wilczek’s book is his wide-ranging interest in the way the beauty he finds in symmetry appears across human experience.... He has accomplished a rare feat: Writing a book of profound humanity based on questions aimed directly at the eternal.” (The Wall Street Journal)

"A Beautiful Question is both a brilliant exploration of largely uncharted territories and a refreshingly idiosyncratic guide to developments in particle physics." (Nature)

“Relentlessly engaging…not only names but also wisely reframes a lot of basic concepts in modern physics.... Wilczek’s fearless reframing comes as a pleasant relief.” (LA Review of Books)

A Wonderful Listen for This Quantum Physics Buff

As a lay person in the study of Quantum Physics, I have found this audiobook to be a beacon amongst the menagerie of readily available information.

I liked it the first time through, and each time since, for a running total of 5. it's perfect for driving and bedtime listening, .and I'm grateful to have it.

Great book but the conclusion could be better.

The book and its main point was very intellectually thought provoking but its ending was a bit bland.

An amazing listen

This book is full of interesting history and mind blowing scientific synthesis. Listening to it can be almost meditative.

Do What?

This book has a wonderful premise, and starts well. But gets bogged in gluons, etc

Beauty and this book requires time to appreciate.

The body of the book benefits from the excellent glossary and notes, I especially liked the discussion of property spaces and local symmetry. "the physical world doesn't repeat itself but it does rhyme'. I will read it again. Also very well performed.

Too much meta.

I want to like this and have not given up. But my impression is that the gentlemen should perhaps stick with physics. The "philosophy" built up around the presentation is as structured, self-conscious, thus as retro, as Kant, with overviews that exceed content, endless deferrals, pointers, and reminders—not all of which are needless. It seems that this sophomoric search for Pythagorean beauty simply distracts from the deep arguments he is unquestionably qualified to make.

beautiful

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

A beautiful book!!

I am by no means a physicist, but the main body of the text was understandable to me , and very, very interesting . The appendix of physics terms was wonderfully helpful to me.

As a self trained physicist in optical thin film!

What made the experience of listening to A Beautiful Question the most enjoyable?

After 45 years in the field of Vacuum deposited thin films he has made pythagoras come to life , and my lack of math skill come to life in Quantization of simple symmetry to supersymmetry in a simple math of x times y =y times x. but the quantum formula minus x times y= minus y time x and the square of that = 0 (excuse my math skills only high school algebra)After studying polarization for nearly 40 years, the use of ion beams and Rf power sources, high energy electron beams and the physics of these practices.,From schroeder cat in optics that has been proved to the simple wave front interferance on a plane surface.,I understood and related to every word.

What did you like best about this story?

In one of those life time experiences I was involved in the manufacture of the thin films and optics for a small optical table that was submerged in a atomic underground test.I received a call ,as I had guaranteed I would use no materials that would have atomic absorption capacity, but yet we had( gamma decay, not sure on this) or as is known as a hot element that had reacted to the atomic reaction. Thus my optical table was not able to brought to the surface for some period of calculated time based on our analysis and hypothesis and the resulting decay time resultsMy job and the engineer I did the work for was to figure out what the material was I used that caused this reaction. Low and behold I had used argon gas in the Ion beam sputtering process and the atoms had been implanted in the dielectric films. But we are talking 10 to the minus 6 mbar background gas with a partial preasure of 2,5 times ten minus 4 mbar background of argon flow through the Ion Beam gun. in practice under high energy with a packing density on the order of 10 to the minus eight in the film packing density I found this highly intriguing, That only a few molecules of argon gas could create this challenge.

What about Frank Wilczek’s performance did you like?

He ecsplicite going over information, and my 30 sec rewind allowed me to absorb 99 % of the info in space and time.

Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?

A a newly spiritual person in his 60,s and I have just heard Frank mention meta in the book, and as all good physicists keep up on his trade and dreams for those Meta Materials on my radar , and as a participant in build a detector for High Frequency gravitational waves, the use use of all three cores to listen for HFGW,s bring our idea close to home

Any additional comments?

His analogy to music and physics fascinates me , as Light waves in a metamaterial of the right frequency and wavelength funny enough create sound wave.

Fascinating book.

Mr. Wilczek has the brain of a genius and the soul of a poet. His book is always fascinating. While it sometimes went over my head, its core message that the universe embodies beautiful ideas is impossible to miss.