Science books for the general public vary in how the words “universe” and “nature” appear. While some capitalize both, others opt for lowercase. The Nobel laureate and MIT theoretical physicist Frank Wilczek uses “Universe” and “Nature.”
A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature’s Deep Design
By Frank Wilczek (Penguin Press)
Upon reading his inspiring and remarkably accessible A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature’s Deep Design, the reason for his choice becomes clear. There is veneration, even sacredness, in the way Wilczek reflects about Nature. The book is an ode to Nature’s beauty, as seen by a physicist’s mathematical eye: beauty equated with symmetry and symmetry with truth. Wilczek’s language is lyrical and almost mystical. For him, symmetry is “Change Without Change” — “a strange, inhuman mantra for the soul of creation!”
A Beautiful Question is a pilgrimage through the ways mathematical symmetry has proved, again and again in the history of physics, to be a gateway toward truth (truth here meaning a precise description of natural phenomena, from the subatomic to the cosmic). “Our Question asks us to discover beauty at the root of the physical world. To answer its challenge, we must be active on both sides. We must enlarge our sense of beauty, as we enlarge our understanding of reality. For the beauty of Nature’s deep design, we shall find, is as strange as its strangeness is beautiful.”
This is the siren call of the mysterious that seduced Pythagoras, Plato, Kepler, Newton, Maxwell, Einstein, and so many of the greatest minds of all time. The search for beauty follows the mantra that “All Is Number” — that Nature’s blueprint is a mathematical puzzle with symmetry as its centerpiece. To understand the world is to read the mind of the Artisan, as Wilczek calls God. Since Nature is the Artisan’s creation, it must embody its creator’s mathematical genius. The only way to understand it “all,” to get to a physicist’s Theory of Everything, is to follow symmetry’s symphony.
To unveil the hidden code of creation is not only to understand the material world but to transcend our human essence, to connect with something timeless. As Wilczek remarks, this is not solely a scientific question. There are many paths to knowing, and the arts and the humanities play an essential and complementary part to that of the sciences.
There is much at stake: for the theoretical physicist, the possibility of revealing the fundamental unity of Nature; for the artist, the expression and illumination of the inner workings of the human spirit; for the faithful, a connection with the intangible reality of the divine.
A most welcome aspect of Wilczek’s book is its frankness: “Not all beautiful ideas about deep reality are true … nor are all the truths of deep reality beautiful.” His own theory of asymptotic freedom, explaining how particles known as quarks — the constituents of protons and neutrons — behave as free particles at very short distances, is an example of a beautiful and true idea about reality. Other ideas about reality, such as the unified theory of gravity and electromagnetism that uses one extra spatial dimension, are beautiful but untrue. Wilczek’s original way of thinking reframes things we take for granted, like hearing, color, and vision. He also proposes music as the true muse of discovery: “Atoms are musical instruments, and the light they emit makes their tones visible.”
As a remarkably successful physicist whose work has achieved iconic status among his peers, Wilczek has made frequent use of the ordered patterns that we so eagerly identify at all levels of physical reality, from the subatomic to the cosmic. A devout Platonist, he takes symmetry as a shining beacon that illuminates the path toward Nature’s most guarded secrets. Yet, he is careful to praise “those whose faith is not passive, but engages reality.” Wilczek dreams with his eyes wide open.
The book is an impassioned manifesto, a “meditation” on why symmetry is a viable way toward complete unification of the forces of Nature. No competent physicist would question that symmetry has tremendous predictive and explanatory power, but what does remain up for debate is how far the quest may take us.
For instance, is it Nature or the human mind that creates symmetry? It is tempting to declare, as Plato did, that symmetry is Nature’s underlying principle.
As Wilczek writes, reality and the world of ideas are deeply interrelated: Even if our current understanding of particle physics is not this beautiful, deep down there is perfect symmetry, a perfect harmony of tones. We see a distorted reality because we are using the wrong glasses: At energies accessible to current experiments, matter embodies symmetry imperfectly.
One could, however, argue that it is in matter and its manifestations that we find physical reality. In this case, Real precedes Ideal. If there are asymmetries, if Nature is slightly imperfect, it is because physical reality doesn’t care about ultimate perfection. We do. If this is the case, symmetry is a wonderfully useful approximation, but it’s not the real thing.
In the same way that we can construct arguments exploring the efficacy of symmetry, we can explore the reality of asymmetries and imperfections as Nature’s trademark: asymmetries between the amount of matter and antimatter in the Universe; asymmetries in the formulation of the Standard Model of particle physics — which describes how particles of matter interact via three fundamental forces; asymmetries between left-handed and right-handed proteins in living creatures; asymmetries in the shapes of clouds, of trees, of people’s faces. (Imagine how ugly Marilyn Monroe would have been had she had two identical beauty marks, placed symmetrically on her face.) Depending on how we define beauty, asymmetry can be beautiful, too. There is a case to be made for the aesthetics of the imperfect. The question is still beautiful, even if imperfection is the answer.
One could further argue that the power of mathematics resides in its detachment from physical reality, in its being an idealization, an approximation to the real thing. To find symmetric solutions to physical equations, we often need to neglect terms, cut them out to make calculations easier. Under this prism, symmetry is a reduction of reality, not its essence.
Espousing this alternative point of view is not the same as quitting on symmetry. Quite the contrary, it brings symmetry and asymmetry together, in complementary fashion, as guiding principles for our quest to understand the world. It is from the creative tension between symmetry and asymmetry that much of the structures we see in the world emerge. In terms Wilczek would appreciate, symmetry and asymmetry may be the yin and yang of creation.
I imagine Wilczek would agree on the ugliness of a perfectly symmetric Marilyn Monroe, although he might not agree on the aesthetic of the imperfect. Fortunately, the issue can, at least in principle, be settled. Continuing experiments at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland should, in the next five years or so, find or not find the telltale “supersymmetric” particles that would reveal the ultimate beauty of design Wilczek so eloquently argues for in A Beautiful Question. Meanwhile, whatever the answer Nature will ultimately give us, we have the privilege of engaging with an enlightened and humble mind.
Marcelo Gleiser is a professor of natural philosophy at Dartmouth College and director of Dartmouth Institute for Cross-Disciplinary Engagement. He is the author of The Island of Knowledge: The Limits of Science and the Search for Meaning (Basic Books, 2014).
