Frank Wilczek - Idea Quotes

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

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
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
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
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
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