Aug 3, 2015 05:21 PM
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books...lczek.html
EXCERPT: [...] [Frank] Wilczek, a Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist, sets out to answer a deceptively simple question: “Does the world embody beautiful ideas?” Or to rephrase this in a slightly more useful way: “Is the physical universe, and the equations that physicists have derived to explain it, beautiful?”
The author’s contention is that the standard model of particle physics (or the “Core Theory”, as Wilczek calls it) is indeed beautiful, but to appreciate this the reader must first understand what the standard model actually is. So the bulk of this book is a summary of the development of key notions in the history of physics, and how we have come to uncover the “fundamental operating system” of nature.
Wilczek starts his “meditation” with Pythagoras and his theorem on right-angled triangles that revealed a deep relationship between geometry and number, and his investigations into music and the link between harmony and number. These, Wilczek argues, were the first inklings towards the deep numerical order underlying the world, and he returns throughout the book to these themes of order, pattern, symmetry and simplicity in the laws governing the universe.
[...] As Wilczek explains, physicists have become so accustomed to finding that the laws of nature they infer from experiments possess deep symmetries that the reverse process is now attempted – the proposition of equations containing lots of symmetry, followed by the study of whether nature uses them. The theory of supersymmetry, or SUSY, has been developed to resolve the apparent duality in the universe between forces and matter by explaining the two as simply manifestations of the same underlying structure...
EXCERPT: [...] [Frank] Wilczek, a Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist, sets out to answer a deceptively simple question: “Does the world embody beautiful ideas?” Or to rephrase this in a slightly more useful way: “Is the physical universe, and the equations that physicists have derived to explain it, beautiful?”
The author’s contention is that the standard model of particle physics (or the “Core Theory”, as Wilczek calls it) is indeed beautiful, but to appreciate this the reader must first understand what the standard model actually is. So the bulk of this book is a summary of the development of key notions in the history of physics, and how we have come to uncover the “fundamental operating system” of nature.
Wilczek starts his “meditation” with Pythagoras and his theorem on right-angled triangles that revealed a deep relationship between geometry and number, and his investigations into music and the link between harmony and number. These, Wilczek argues, were the first inklings towards the deep numerical order underlying the world, and he returns throughout the book to these themes of order, pattern, symmetry and simplicity in the laws governing the universe.
[...] As Wilczek explains, physicists have become so accustomed to finding that the laws of nature they infer from experiments possess deep symmetries that the reverse process is now attempted – the proposition of equations containing lots of symmetry, followed by the study of whether nature uses them. The theory of supersymmetry, or SUSY, has been developed to resolve the apparent duality in the universe between forces and matter by explaining the two as simply manifestations of the same underlying structure...
