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Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

130 | Frank Wilczek on the Present and Future of Fundamental Physics

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

Sean Carroll | Wondery

Society & Culture, Physics, Philosophy, Science, Ideas, Society

4.84.4K Ratings

🗓️ 18 January 2021

⏱️ 76 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

What is the world made of? How does it behave? These questions, aimed at the most basic level of reality, are the subject of fundamental physics. What counts as fundamental is somewhat contestable, but it includes our best understanding of matter and energy, space and time, and dynamical laws, as well as complex emergent structures and the sweep of the cosmos. Few people are better positioned to talk about fundamental physics than Frank Wilczek, a Nobel Laureate who has made significant contributions to our understanding of the strong interactions, dark matter, black holes, and condensed matter, as well as proposing the existence of time crystals. We talk about what we currently know about fundamental physics, but also the directions in which it is heading, for better and for worse.

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Frank Wilczek received his Ph.D. in physics from Princeton University. He is currently the Herman Feshbach professor of physics at the MIT; Founding Director of the T. D. Lee Institute and Chief Scientist at Wilczek Quantum Center, Shanghai Jiao Tong University; Distinguished Professor at Arizona State University; and Professor at Stockholm University. Among his numerous awards are the MacArthur Fellowship, the Nobel Prize in Physics (2004, for asymptotic freedom), membership in the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the author of numerous books, most recently Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality.


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Transcript

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0:00.0

Hello everyone, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll.

0:03.8

And as many of you know, I am a physicist by training and occupation.

0:08.4

And the kinds of physics I do, right? Cosmology, relativity, gravitation,

0:13.7

spacetime, particle physics, field theory, all this stuff.

0:17.2

Sometimes goes under the name Fundamental Physics.

0:20.4

It's a somewhat contentious name because fundamental sounds more important,

0:24.7

and that's not what it's supposed to mean.

0:26.4

At one point in my life, I tried to start a campaign to rename fundamental physics

0:30.8

elementary physics, because elementary sounds a little bit less pretentious,

0:34.9

and it's about the same idea, the underlying stuff, right?

0:38.6

The most fundamental bottom layer stuff, out of which everything else is made.

0:42.4

Anyway, that never caught on. That never does catch on.

0:45.1

Changing names is very hard. Fundamental physics is what we call it.

0:49.0

As many of you know, fundamental physics is in a weird phase right now.

0:53.3

In some sense, it's a little bit stuck, not completely stuck, but let's say progress is slower than

0:58.2

it used to be. In some sense, that's because we were spoiled by the first half of the 20th century,

1:04.0

where we invented quantum mechanics and relativity and found the expanding universe,

1:08.2

and it was just an amazing change every decade.

1:11.1

So maybe now we're in a more natural state of being, but still, we long for the good days when

1:16.7

we could revolutionize physics every so often.

1:20.0

And right now, our theories are just too good. We have standard models of gravity,

1:24.5

of particle physics, of cosmology, and they fit a wide variety of data.

...

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