A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature's Deep Design

Resumen del libro

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. 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 and the ancient belief in the music of the spheres to Galileo, Newton, Maxwell, Einstein, and into the deep waters of twentieth-century physics. 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 the same ones that govern musical instruments and sound; the subatomic particles that are responsible for most of our mass are determined by simple geometric symmetries.
Gorgeously illustrated, "A Beautiful Question" is a mind-shifting book that braids the age-old quest for beauty and the age-old quest for truth into a thrilling synthesis. It is a dazzling and important work from one of our best thinkers, whose humor and infectious sense of wonder animate every page. Yes: The world is a work of art, and its deepest truths are ones we already feel, as if they were somehow written in our souls.

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).