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Frank Wilczek citations
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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   citations 0   J'aime

Frank Wilczek: Citations en anglais

“Thinking along these lines will help prepare us for the day when we—or more likely, our distant descendents—will develop the machinery and cleverness to begin to program [create] worlds ourselves…”

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Frank Wilczek

Source: Longing for the Harmonies: Themes and Variations from Modern Physics (1987), Ch.25 A Suggested Unity

“The “Copernican Principle” or “Cosmic Mediocrity”… states, basically, that Earth does not occupy a privileged place in the universe. Universality asserts more, namely that there are no privileged places or times.”

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Frank Wilczek

"Multiversality" (2013)

“It is quite easy to include a weight for empty space in the equations of gravity. Einstein did so in 1917, introducing what came to be known as the cosmological constant into his equations. His motivation was to construct a static model of the universe. To achieve this, he had to introduce a negative mass density for empty space, which just canceled the average positive density due to matter. With zero total density, gravitational forces can be in static equilibrium. Hubble's subsequent discovery of the expansion of the universe, of course, made Einstein's static model universe obsolete. …The fact is that to this day we do not understand in a deep way why the vacuum doesn't weigh, or (to say the same thing in another way) why the cosmological constant vanishes, or (to say it in yet another way) why Einstein's greatest blunder was a mistake.”

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

“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.”

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Frank Wilczek

"Multiversality" (2013)

“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?”

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p, 125
"Multiversality" (2013)

“Why can stars do better than the big bang? …During the big bang, there were only a few minutes when nuclei could form. Very rare processes, or slow ones, played little role. A case in point is the key process from which the sun derives its energy. In this reaction, two protons collide to produce a deuterium nucleus, a neutrino, and a positron. …This reaction belongs to the family of weak interactions. …It remains… a remarkable—and for humanity, remarkably fortunate—circumstance that the central reaction that drives the sun is so rare. It is only this extraordinary rarity that allows the average proton in the sun to last so long, billions of years, even though it is colliding with other protons millions of times a second. …an entertaining example of Treiman's theorem.”

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

“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."”

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

“If you pass the light from a sodium flash through a prism, you get a pattern very different from the familiar continuous rainbow that Newton elicited from natural sunlight. Instead of a continuous pattern, in which all gradations of pure color are apparently represented, the sodium flash generates a series of lines of light. …in the musical analogy, sodium produces a chord where sunlight produced all possible tones—"white noise."”

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Other elements produce other chords.
Longing for the Harmonies: Themes and Variations from Modern Physics (1987)

“In the table—and in nature—we find (leaving aside the antineutrino) fifteen fundamental fermions, with diverse strong, weak, and electromagnetic charges. …They are so closely related by symmetry transformations that they are, so to speak, no more than different faces of the same cube.”

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

“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.”

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"Multiversality" (2013)

“The answer to the ancient question "Why is there something rather than nothing?" would then be that ‘nothing’ is unstable.”

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Frank Wilczek

Quoted in an article, "Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing?" http://www.csicop.org/sb/show/why_is_there_something_rather_than_nothing, by Victor Stenger (June 2006).

“When we view nature stripped to essentials, so to speak, in this Unification Table, what we see is… a five bit register. …It is in just this form that data is stored and manipulated within a digital computer. …Every particle, then, can be specified by a five-bit word and stored in a five-bit register. It's eerie that even the odd restriction on how many minus signs are allowed is reminiscent of a trick used in computers, to detect errors in transmission. You see, if allowed words must have an odd number of minus signs, any single error in transmission of a word can be detected. …our world might be an intricate program working itself out on a gigantic computing machine.”

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

“What is conserved, in modern physics, is not any particular substance or material but only much more abstract entities such as energy, momentum, and electric charge. The permanent aspects of reality are not particular materials or structures but rather the possible forms of structures and the rules for their transformation.”

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Source: Longing for the Harmonies: Themes and Variations from Modern Physics (1987), Ch.8 The Weak Interaction

“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.”

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Source: The Lightness of Being – Mass, Ether and the Unification of Forces (2008), Ch. 10, p. 128.

“It is delightful in itself when we are able to interpret features of the present as signs confirming our understanding of the past.”

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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)

“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.”

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Frank Wilczek

"Multiversality" (2013)

“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.”

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Frank Wilczek

Kepler... in the third book of Harmonice mundi... attempted to make other... related, connections between musical harmony and mathematical proportion.
Longing for the Harmonies: Themes and Variations from Modern Physics (1987)

“Exoplanet astronomy will systematically survey our galaxy, gathering information on the masses, orbits, geology, and atmospheres of millions of planets. As a byproduct, we will learn how rare life is and what conditions it requires. What we discover might support tests and refinements of anthropic reasoning.”

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Frank Wilczek

[Physics in 100 years, Physics Today, 69, 4, 10.1063/PT.3.3137, April 2016, 32–39] (quote from p. 38)

“Physics is my religious belief. In the sense that in physics we discover a fantastically wonderful world out there that’s rich in potential, rich in realization, and that has ample scope for fantasy, because the laws are so strange and there’s so much stuff out there to understand. And when you understand it, you understand how that could be.
I learn that I myself am very small. But I am also very large because I contain multitudes, as Walt Whitman said. I can process information. I can understand things. I can imagine. I can have fun. That’s the essence of my religion. I learn my religion from the study of what the world is and how it works.”

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Frank Wilczek

as quoted by Claudia Dreyfus in: [January 21, 2021, A Prodigy Who Cracked Open the Cosmos (an interview with Franck Wilczek), Quanta Magazine, https://www.quantamagazine.org/frank-wilczek-cracked-open-the-cosmos-20210112/]

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