Support for on-being with Christa Tippett comes from the Fetzer Institute, helping build the

spiritual foundation for a loving world. Fetzer envisions a world that embraces love as a guiding

principle and animating force for our lives. A powerful love that helps us live in sacred

relationship with ourselves, others, and the natural world. Learn more by visiting Fetzer.org.

Having tasted beauty at the heart of the world, we hunger for more. These are words of the

Nobel physicist Frank Wilchuk in his book A Beautiful Question. It's a win some joyful meditation

on the question, does the world embody beautiful ideas, probing the world by way of science as a

work of art? This physicist reminds us that time and space, mystery and order are so much stranger

and more generous than we can comprehend. My experience of how his mind makes connections took off as we

bantered before our formal conversation could begin. I just wrote a column for the Wall Street Journal

that I thought might be interesting to discuss. What was it about? It was about my experience I had at the

Botanical Garden in Phoenix, the desert Botanical Garden. There was an art exhibit called Fields of

Light by Bruce Monroe, which consisted of acres in the desert on a hillside of lights that slowly

pulsated asynchronously and different colors. It was the nighttime. It just made me think in a different

way about what it might be to wander inside a mind and what thought it looks like. To me, it was

awesome because it brought together so many analogies and metaphors and ways of thinking about thinking

and visualizing it. I suddenly thought that this is what thought really is. I'm Christa Tippet and

this is on being. Frank Wilchick won the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics for his discoveries about

quirks that helped illuminate our understanding of the four fundamental forces of nature in the

standard model of physics, though Frank Wilchick more poetically calls the standard model the core

theory. He's a professor at MIT and he grew up in Queens. I spoke with him in 2016.

I know you grew up, your father was an electrical engineer, radio repairman,

...