The Lightness of Being: Mass, Ether, and the Unification of Forces

Resumen del libro

What's the meaning of it all? Or rather: what exactly is 'it'? Here Frank Wilczek, Nobel Prize-winning physicist and legend, examines the very nature of reality itself, showing how almost everything we think we know about 'it' is wrong.


The Lightness of Being is an engaging tour de force, revealing a universe where matter is the hum of strange music, mass doesn't weigh, and empty space is a multilayered, multicoloured superconductor. Physicists' understanding of the essential nature of reality changed radically over the past quarter century. And Frank Wilczek has played a lead role in establishing the new paradigms. Transcending the clash and mismatch of older ideas about what matter and space is, Wilczek presents some brilliant and clear syntheses. Extraordinarily readable and authoritative, The Lightness of Being is the first book to unwrap these exciting new ideas for the general public. It explores their implications for basic questions about space, mass, energy, and the longed-for possibility of a fully unified theory of Nature.


Pointing to new directions where great discoveries in fundamental physics are likely, and providing a visionary context for the experiments in CERN, he envisions a new Golden Age in physics.

Biografía del autor

Frank Wilczek es físico teórico, autor y aventurero intelectual. Ha recibido numerosos premios por su trabajo, entre ellos un Premio Nobel de Física en 2004. Wilczek ha contribuido de forma trascendental a la física de partículas fundamentales, la cosmología y la física de materiales. Su investigación teórica en la actualidad incluye el trabajo con axiones, anyones y cristales de espacio-tiempo. Actualmente es profesor de Física en el MIT, director fundador del T. D. Lee Institute y responsable científico en el Wilczek Quantum Center de la Universidad Jiao Tong de Shanghái, profesor distinguido en la Universidad Estatal de Arizona y profesor en la Universidad de Estocolmo. Es autor de La ligereza del ser (Crítica, 2009) y El mundo como obra de arte (Crítica, 2016).