Ep. 82: Frank Wilczek

Talking Beats with Daniel Lelchuk

"Symmetry is the idea that you have patterns that allow transformation that might have changed them but don't, so a circle has a lot of symmetry because you can rotate it around the center and it's still the same object. This can also be applied to concepts in physics."

Physicist Frank Wilczek is here to discuss his new book Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality, where he outlines who we are, what we are, and where we are in relation to the world and the rest of the universe. He and Daniel have a discussion that goes in many directions, centered around Wilczek's love of history and culture and the connections he brings from those fields into physics. Beginning with how a baby interacts with the physical world around him, Wilczek charts the human discovery of the fundamentals that govern and shape us and everything around us. What does it mean for an equation to be beautiful? Does the night sky still dazzle someone like Wilczek, who has been studying all this his entire life? How many stars really are there?

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Professor Frank Wilczek is considered one of the world's most eminent theoretical physicists. He is known, among other things, for the discovery of asymptotic freedom, the development of quantum chromodynamics, the invention of axions, and the discovery and exploitation of new forms of quantum statistics (anyons). When only 21 years old and a graduate student at Princeton University, in work with David Gross he defined the properties of color gluons, which hold atomic nuclei together.

Professor Wilczek received his B.S. degree from the University of Chicago and his Ph.D. from Princeton University. He taught at Princeton from 1974–81. During the period 1981–88, he was the Chancellor Robert Huttenback Professor of Physics at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the first permanent member of the National Science Foundation's Institute for Theoretical Physics. In the fall of 2000, he moved from the Institute for Advanced Study, where he was the J.R. Oppenheimer Professor, to the MIT Department of Physics, where he is the Herman Feshbach Professor of Physics. Since 2002, he has been an Adjunct Professor in the Centro de Estudios Científicos of Valdivia, Chile.

Professor Wilczek has been a Sloan Foundation Fellow (1975-77) and a MacArthur Foundation Fellow (1982-87). He has received UNESCO's Dirac Medal, the American Physical Society's Sakurai Prize, the Michelson Prize from Case Western University, and the Lorentz Medal of the Netherlands Academy for his contributions to the development of theoretical physics. In 2004 he received the Nobel Prize in Physics, and in 2005 the King Faisal Prize. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the Netherlands Academy of Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is a Trustee of the University of Chicago. He contributes regularly to Physics Today and to Nature, explaining topics at the frontiers of physics to wider scientific audiences. He received the Lilienfeld Prize of the American Physical Society for these activities. Two of his pieces have been anthologized in Best American Science Writing (2003, 2005). Together with his wife Betsy Devine, he wrote a beautiful book, Longing for the Harmonies (W.W. Norton).