“People wrestle with what the world is all about,” Wilczek tells MIT News. In his new book, he distills scientists’ collective understanding of the physical world into 10 broad philosophical themes, using the fundamental theories of physics, from cosmology to quantum mechanics, to reframe ideas of space, time, and our place in the universe. He has also authored several popular science books on physics and the history of science. Wilczek, who is the Herman Feshbach Professor of Physics at MIT, has since made groundbreaking contributions to our fundamental understanding of the physical world, for which he has been widely recognized, most notably in 2004 with the Nobel Prize in Physics, which he shared with physicists David Gross and David Politzer. In his new book, “Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality,” published today by Penguin Press, Wilczek writes that the lessons were a revelation: “To experience the deep harmony between two different universes - the universe of beautiful ideas and the universe of physical behavior - was for me a kind of spiritual awakening. He had decided to sit in on a class by physics professor Peter Freund, who, with a zeal “bordering on rapture,” led students through mathematical theories of symmetry and ways in which these theories can predict behaviors in the physical world. It was during this turbulent time that Wilczek found unexpected comfort, and a new understanding of the world, in mathematics. At the University of Chicago, where Frank Wilczek was an undergraduate, regularly scheduled classes were “improvised and semivoluntary” amid the turmoil, as he recalls. In the spring of 1970, colleges across the country erupted with student protests in response to the Vietnam War and the National Guard’s shooting of student demonstrators at Kent State University.
To understand ourselves and our place in the universe, “we should have humility but also self-respect,” the physicist writes in a new book.
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