Frank Wilczek - Space Quotes

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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
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 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
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
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