Frank Wilczek Quotes

43 Sourced Quotes

In science... the ultimate judges are not experts but experiments.

Frank Wilczek
The bases of music are rhythm and harmony. Rhythm is ordered recurrence in time... As the planets move around the sun, they repeat their orbits periodically; thus there is already a primitive kind of rhythm in their motion.... Harmony... can be considered a special kind of rhythm.... pure musical tones are produced when the vibrations are... periodic or... repeat themselves regularly in time. Two tones harmonize if their intervals of repetition are in rhythm—or, in mathematical language, if their periods are in proportion. Kepler... in the third book of Harmonice mundi... attempted to make other... related, connections between musical harmony and mathematical proportion.

Frank Wilczek
As the idea of permanence of objects has faded, the idea of permanence of physical laws has become better established and more powerful.

Frank Wilczek
Thinking along these lines will help prepare us for the day when we—or more likely, our distant descendents—will develop the machinery and cleverness to begin to program [create] worlds ourselves...

Frank Wilczek
The Copernican Principle or Cosmic Mediocrity... states, basically, that Earth does not occupy a privileged place in the universe. Universality asserts more, namely that there are no privileged places or times.

Frank Wilczek
So let us listen to the light—what music do we hear? For one thing, we can elicit from each chemical element its own, unique chord. You may sometimes have noticed that a bright yellow flash is produced if ordinary table salt is sprinkled on a flame... a first bare hint of the subject of flame spectra... The fact that different elements emit light with different color characteristics is exploited by the makers of fireworks.

Frank Wilczek
In the past scientists have repeatedly reached intellectual closure on inadequate pictures of the universe, and underestimated its scale.

Frank Wilczek
We evolved to be good at learning and using rules of thumb, not at searching for ultimate causes and making fine distinctions. Still less did we evolve to spin out long chains of calculation that connect fundamental laws to observable consequences. Computers are much better at it!

Frank Wilczek
If the universe contains everything that exists, what can be outside it? If the answer is Things that don't exist, then multiverse becomes an idea in the domain of psychology, not physics.

Frank Wilczek
It is delightful in itself when we are able to interpret features of the present as signs confirming our understanding of the past.

Frank Wilczek
To put it crudely, theorists can be tempted to think along the lines If people as clever as us haven't explained it, that's because it can't be explained – it's just an accident. I believe there are at least two important regularities among standard model parameters that do have deeper explanations, namely the unification of couplings and the smallness of the QCD θ parameter. There may well be others.

Frank Wilczek
Ironically, conventional quantum mechanics itself involves a vast expansion of physical reality, which may be enough to avoid Einstein Insanity. The equations of quantum dynamics allow physicists to predict the future values of the wave function, given its present value. According to the Schrödinger equation, the wave function evolves in a completely predictable way. But in practice we never have access to the full wave function, either at present or in the future, so this predictability is unattainable. If the wave function provides the ultimate description of reality — a controversial issue! — we must conclude that God plays a deep yet strictly rule-based game, which looks like dice to us.

Frank Wilczek
In most theoretical embodiments of inflationary cosmology, the currently observed universe appears as a small part of a much larger multiverse. In this framework to hold throughout the universe need not hold through all space. They can be accidents of our local geography, so to speak. If that is so, then it is valid – indeed, necessary – to consider selection effects. It may be that some of the fundamental constants, in particular, cannot be determined by theoretical reasoning, even in principle, because they really are different elsewhere.

Frank Wilczek
There is a simple rule for composite objects, such as nuclei or atoms. The rule is that if such an object contains an odd number of fermions, the composite object is a fermion. Otherwise, it is a boson.... this simple rule doesn't care at all about the number of bosons in the composite object.

Frank Wilczek
If you pass the light from a sodium flash through a prism, you get a pattern very different from the familiar continuous rainbow that Newton elicited from natural sunlight. Instead of a continuous pattern, in which all gradations of pure color are apparently represented, the sodium flash generates a series of lines of light.... in the musical analogy, sodium produces a chord where sunlight produced all possible tones—"white noise." Other elements produce other chords.

Frank Wilczek
An ordinary mistake is one that leads to a dead end, while a profound mistake is one that leads to progress. Anyone can make an ordinary mistake, but it takes a genius to make a profound mistake.

Frank Wilczek
In physics, your solution should convince a reasonable person. In math, you have to convince a person who's trying to make trouble. Ultimately, in physics, you're hoping to convince Nature. And I've found Nature to be pretty reasonable.

Frank Wilczek
A common habit of thought... is the idea that space is [a] simple receptacle in which bodies move around, with no two bodies present at the same point.... In modern quantum physics generally, and in the standard model of fundamental physics in particular, physical space appears as a far more flexible framework. Many kinds of particles can be present at the same point in space at the same time. Indeed, the primary ingredients of the standard model are not particles at all, but an abundance of quantum fields, each a complex object in itself, and all omnipresent.

Frank Wilczek
In a sense, all of Earth glows in the dark. The energy release from natural radioactivity, the lingering fluorescence of stellar explosions, keeps Earth dynamic. It melts the core and keeps it flowing, and heats the crust and mantle, with consequences ranging from the generation of earth's magnetic field to earthquakes and the motion of continents. By contrast, Luna and Mars, because they are smaller, derive less energy from radioactive decays. Geologically, they are dead.

Frank Wilczek
What should be most significant to us are not physical artifacts, but the meaning they embody.... whenever we create paintings, songs, poems, books, computer programs—or ideas in the minds of children—we do something of this sort.

Frank Wilczek
I went off to college planning to major in math or philosophy— of course, both those ideas are really the same idea.

Frank Wilczek
In physics, you don't have to go around making trouble for yourself — nature does it for you.

Frank Wilczek
The answer to the ancient question "Why is there something rather than nothing?" would then be that 'nothing' is unstable.

Frank Wilczek
Particles that, like 4He, show constructive interference are said to be bosons—a shorthand term for "particles obeying Bose–Einstein statistics." …One way to recognize bosons is their tendency to imitate one each other.... the presence of one boson increases the chance that another of its identical siblings will also appear in the same spot. There's an attraction between them. We will speak... of an attractive identity force drawing together identical bosons. Lasers are a spectacular example...

Frank Wilczek
We have heard that nature can sing some strange and unfamiliar songs. In coming to appreciate these songs, we develop a heightened perception... leavened by an admixture of our own creation...

Frank Wilczek
In the table—and in nature—we find (leaving aside the antineutrino) fifteen fundamental fermions, with diverse strong, weak, and electromagnetic charges.... They are so closely related by symmetry transformations that they are, so to speak, no more than different faces of the same cube.

Frank Wilczek
The happy coincidences between life's requirements and nature's choices of parameter-values might be just a series of flukes, but one could be forgiven for beginning to suspect that something deeper is at work. That suspicion is the first deep root of anthropic reasoning.

Frank Wilczek
What is conserved, in modern physics, is not any particular substance or material but only much more abstract entities such as energy, momentum, and electric charge. The permanent aspects of reality are not particular materials or structures but rather the possible forms of structures and the rules for their transformation.

Frank Wilczek
If grand unified theories are correct, we ought to be able to derive the relative power of the strong, weak, and electromagnetic interactions at accessible energies from their presumed equality at much higher energies. When this is attempted, a wonderful result emerges.... in the form first calculated by Howard Georgi, Helen Quinn, and Steven Weinberg... The couplings of strong-interaction gluons decrease, those of the [weak interaction] W bosons stay roughly constant, and those of the [electromagnetic interaction] photons increase at short distances [or high energies]—so they all tend to converge, as desired.

Frank Wilczek
When we view nature stripped to essentials, so to speak, in this Unification Table, what we see is... a five bit register.... It is in just this form that data is stored and manipulated within a digital computer.... Every particle, then, can be specified by a five-bit word and stored in a five-bit register. It's eerie that even the odd restriction on how many minus signs are allowed is reminiscent of a trick used in computers, to detect errors in transmission. You see, if allowed words must have an odd number of minus signs, any single error in transmission of a word can be detected.... our world might be an intricate program working itself out on a gigantic computing machine.

Frank Wilczek