Frank Wilczek citations

Frank Wilczek, né le 15 mai 1951 à Mineola dans l'État de New York, est un physicien américain. Il est, avec H. David Politzer et David Gross, colauréat du prix Nobel de physique de 2004 « pour leur découverte de la liberté asymptotique dans la théorie de l'interaction forte ». Wikipedia

✵ 15. mai 1951

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Frank Wilczek: 49 citations0 J'aime

Frank Wilczek: Citations en anglais

“Quite undeservedly, the ether has acquired a bad name.”

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Fantastic realities: 49 mind journeys and a trip to Stockholm, Singapore: World Scientific, 2006, p. 293, and "The Persistence of Ether": Physics Today, Vol. 52, Issue 1, pp. 11–13 (January 1999) http://xserver2.lns.mit.edu/%7Ecsuggs/physics_today/phystoday/Ether.pdf

“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.”

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Longing for the Harmonies: Themes and Variations from Modern Physics (1987)

“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.”

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"Multiversality" (2013)

“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.”

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Longing for the Harmonies: Themes and Variations from Modern Physics (1987)

“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.)”

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Source: Longing for the Harmonies: Themes and Variations from Modern Physics (1987), Ch.12 Light as Waves

“To understand this radiation [ cosmic microwave background ], it is easier to begin thinking about the radiation from a very hot gas like that inside a neon light. The same neon… is, at room temperature, utterly transparent… The character of matter in general changes abruptly when it gets heated above 3,000 degrees or so. Below this temperature, matter is electrically neutral… At high temperatures in a neon light, the electrically charged pieces of atoms become unstuck. Frequent and violent collisions break down neutral atoms into electrons and unbalanced nuclei. Matter in this state is called plasma, and it radiates much of its collision energy in the form of light. …a gas of neutral atoms (like air) is virtually transparent. The free [charged] nuclei and electrons of plasma, by contrast, couple to light's electromagnetic fields and absorb it very efficiently. …You …see light only from the borderline layer of neon between opaque plasma and transparent neutral atoms.”

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Longing for the Harmonies: Themes and Variations from Modern Physics (1987)

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

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Source: Longing for the Harmonies: Themes and Variations from Modern Physics (1987), Ch.7 New Star

“E = mc2 really applies only to isolated bodies at rest. In general, when you have moving bodies, or interacting bodies, energy and mass aren't proportional. E = mc2 simply doesn't apply. …For moving bodies, the correct mass-energy equation is
E=\frac {mc^2} {\sqrt{1-\frac{v^2} {c^2}}}
where v is the velocity. For a body at rest (v=0), this becomes E = mc2. …we must consider the special case of particles with zero mass… examples include photons, color gluons, and gravitons. If we attempt to put m = 0 and v = c in our general mass-energy equation, both the numerator and denominator on the right-hand-side vanish, and we get the nonsensical relation E = 0/0. The correct result is that the energy of a photon can take any value. …The energy E of a photon is proportional to the frequency f of the light it represents. …they are related by the Planck-Einstein-Schrödinger equation E = hf, where h is Plank's constant.”

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when the velocity <math>v</math> approaches the speed of light c, the denominator approaches 0 thus E approaches infinity, unless m = 0.
Source: The Lightness of Being – Mass, Ether and the Unification of Forces (2008), Ch. 3, p. 19 & Appendix A

“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!”

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we must conclude that “God plays a deep yet strictly rule-based game, which looks like dice to us.”
Einstein’s Parable of Quantum Insanity (2015)

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

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Source: Longing for the Harmonies: Themes and Variations from Modern Physics (1987), Ch.32 Hidden Harmonies

“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.”

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Longing for the Harmonies: Themes and Variations from Modern Physics (1987)

“Einstein’s great friend and intellectual sparring partner Niels Bohr had a nuanced view of truth. Whereas according to Bohr, the opposite of a simple truth is a falsehood, the opposite of a deep truth is another deep truth. In that spirit, let us introduce the concept of a deep falsehood, whose opposite is likewise a deep falsehood. It seems fitting to conclude this essay with an epigram that, paired with the one we started with, gives a nice example: “Naïveté is doing the same thing over and over, and always expecting the same result.””

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Einstein’s Parable of Quantum Insanity (2015)

“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.”

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Source: The Lightness of Being – Mass, Ether and the Unification of Forces (2008), Ch. 1, p. 12.

“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.”

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Longing for the Harmonies: Themes and Variations from Modern Physics (1987)

“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.”

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Longing for the Harmonies: Themes and Variations from Modern Physics (1987)

“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.”

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Source: The Lightness of Being – Mass, Ether and the Unification of Forces (2008), Ch. 1, p. 9.

“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.”

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"Multiversality" (2013)

“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.”

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Fourth Theme, Prelude Four
Longing for the Harmonies: Themes and Variations from Modern Physics (1987)

“Once helium burning has occurred… the next possible reaction—carbon burning—is not necessarily slow… This reaction involves …a strong as opposed to a weak interaction. …Carbon burning results in magnesium. …Taking a cross section of a highly evolved star would reveal a system of many layers. The inner layers have been subjected to the largest pressures, thereby forced to the highest temperatures, and burned the furthest; the outermost layers, by contrast, have not burned at all. Thus, as we proceed from outside in, there will be an outermost layer with the initial mix of hydrogen and helium, a layer of mostly helium, a layer of carbon, a layer of magnesium, and so on. …So we arrive at the picture of a star, in the latest stages of its evolution… now composed of mostly carbon nuclei and other explosive material.”

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Longing for the Harmonies: Themes and Variations from Modern Physics (1987)

“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.”

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Longing for the Harmonies: Themes and Variations from Modern Physics (1987)

“In science… the ultimate judges are not experts but experiments.”

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Source: Longing for the Harmonies: Themes and Variations from Modern Physics (1987), Ch.13 Light as Lumps

“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…”

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Longing for the Harmonies: Themes and Variations from Modern Physics (1987)

“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.”

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Source: Longing for the Harmonies: Themes and Variations from Modern Physics (1987), Ch.11 Explosions and Fluourescence (or, Entropy's Revenge)

“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!”

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Source: The Lightness of Being – Mass, Ether and the Unification of Forces (2008), Ch. 1, p. 8.

“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.”

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"Multiversality" (2013)

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

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"Multiversality" (2013)

“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.”

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Longing for the Harmonies: Themes and Variations from Modern Physics (1987)

“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.”

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p, 125
"Multiversality" (2013)

“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…”

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Source: Longing for the Harmonies: Themes and Variations from Modern Physics (1987), Ch.32 Hidden Harmonies

“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.”

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Source: The Lightness of Being – Mass, Ether and the Unification of Forces (2008), Ch. 3, p. 19.

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