Frank Wilczek Quotes

43 Sourced Quotes

Sam Treiman... has quoted something he called Treiman's theorem... Impossible things usually don't happen.... With the discovery of radioactivity... it suddenly became apparent that the "impossible" was happening all the time. Uranium, thorium, radium... fit all the requirements of chemical elements. They could not be broken down by any of the standard methods... But occasionally... atoms of these elements spontaneously changed into other kinds of atoms.... So what is left of the doctrine of the elements? Is alchemy reinstated? Not at all. The point is that the doctrine fails only under rare or special conditions.... We can isolate the conditions in which they do, and retain a more restricted but still useful concept of the "impossible."

Frank Wilczek
Different ways of writing the same equation can suggest very different things, even if they are logically equivalent.... In Einstein's original 1905 paper, you do not find the equation E = mc2. What you find is m = E/c2.... the title of the paper is a question: "Does the Inertia of a Body Depend on Its Energy Content?" …If we can explain mass in terms of energy, we'll be improving our description of the world. We'll need fewer ingrediants in our world-recipe.

Frank Wilczek
The whole idea of science is really to listen to nature, in her own language, as part of a continuing dialogue.

Frank Wilczek
When two identical 3He atoms collide... the interference is destructive. Particles that behave like 3He atoms are called fermions, short for "particles obeying Fermi–Dirac statistics."... while bosons imitate one another... the "identity force" between fermions acts like a repulsion, and the probability of finding a fermion at some point in space is reduced if some of its identical siblings are nearby.... It is the repulsive identity forces between electrons that support white dwarf stars... against their own gravity.

Frank Wilczek
Quite undeservedly, the ether has acquired a bad name.

Frank Wilczek
The most abstract conservation laws of physics come into their being in describing equilibrium in the most extreme conditions. They are the most rigorous conservation laws, the last to break down. The more extreme the conditions, the fewer the conserved structures... In a deep sense, we understand the interior of the sun better that the interior of the earth, and the early stages of the big bang best of all.

Frank Wilczek
The result will be points of quiescence—technically known as nodes—where the air's density varies not at all, and no sound is heard. Note the paradox here: either sphere alone creates a sound wave at this point; two spheres together add up to no sound there at all. Two sources can add up to give less than one. This is the essence of destructive interference. (When two sources are giving the same instruction, the resulting vibration bears not twice but four times the energy. This phenomenon, oxymoronically known as constructive interference, may seem puzzling.)

Frank Wilczek
The traditional cosmological Multiverse considers that there might be physical realms inaccessible to us due to their separation in space-time. The quantum Multiverse arises from entities that occupy the same space-time, but are distant in Hilbert space – or in the jargon, decoherent.

Frank Wilczek
Intelligent creatures [that] evolved to live deep within the atmosphere of a gas giant planet could be deluded, for eons, into thinking that the Universe is an approximately homogeneous expanse of gas, filling a three-dimensional space, but featuring anisotropic laws of motion (which we would ascribe to the planet's gravitational field). Are we human scientists comparably blinkered?

Frank Wilczek
The main problem with many nonscientific world models is the vigor with which they insist upon their rightness. Once a world model claims to be completely right, it is no longer open to any changes.... Closed systems can be comforting, but they are limited.... It's not the best we can do. Neither is extreme "open-mindednesss" that slides into "empty headedness"—the ideal that we can never really know anything.

Frank Wilczek
Knowing how to calculate something is not the same as understanding it. Having a computer to calculate the origin of mass for us may be convincing, but is not satisfying. Fortunately we can understand it too.

Frank Wilczek
The phase transition paradigm: The standard model of fundamental physics incorporates, as one of its foundational principles, the idea that empty space or vacuum can exist in different phases, typically associated with different amounts of symmetry. Moreover, the laws of the standard model itself suggest that phase transitions will occur, as functions of temperature. Extensions of the standard model to build in higher symmetry (gauge unification or especially supersymmetry) can support effective vacua with radically different properties, separated by great distance or by domain walls. That would be a form of failure of universality, in our sense, whose existence is suggested by the standard model.

Frank Wilczek
For many centuries before modern science, and for the first two and a half centuries of modern science, the division of reality into matter and light seemed self-evident.... As long as the separation between the massive and the massless persisted, a unified description of the physical world could not be achieved.

Frank Wilczek