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Into the Impossible With Brian Keating

Nobel Prizewinner Frank Wilczek: Beautiful Questions, God, Nobels, Imposters & the Power of Beauty (#101)

Into the Impossible With Brian Keating

Brian Keating

Physics, Natural Sciences, Science

4.7 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 17 December 2020

⏱️ 98 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Does the universe embody beautiful ideas? Join me on a cosmic journey with Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek. We will embark on a voyage of related discoveries, from Plato and Pythagoras up to the present. Wilczek’s groundbreaking work in quantum physics was inspired by his intuition to look for a deeper order of beauty in nature. This is the deep logic of the universe—and it is no accident that it is also at the heart of what we find aesthetically pleasing and inspiring.  Wilczek is hardly alone among great scientists in charting his course using beauty as his compass. As he reveals in A Beautiful Question, this has been the heart of scientific pursuit from Pythagoras and the ancient belief in the music of the spheres to Galileo, Newton, Maxwell, Einstein, and into the deep waters of twentieth-century physics. Wilczek brings us right to the edge of knowledge today, where the core insights of even the craziest quantum ideas apply principles we all understand. The equations for atoms and light are almost the same ones that govern musical instruments and sound; the subatomic particles that are responsible for most of our mass are determined by simple geometric symmetries.  Gorgeously illustrated, A Beautiful Question is a mind-shifting book that braids the age-old quest for beauty and the age-old quest for truth into a thrilling synthesis. It is a dazzling and important work from one of our best thinkers, whose humor and infectious sense of wonder animate every page. Yes: The world is a work of art, and its deepest truths are ones we already feel, as if they were somehow written in our souls.  Praise for A Beautiful Question: “An expertly curated tour across 2,500 years of philosophy and physics . . . [Frank Wilczek] has accomplished a rare feat: Writing a book of profound humanity based on questions aimed directly at the eternal.” —The Wall Street Journal  “Both a brilliant exploration of largely uncharted territories and a refreshingly idiosyncratic guide to developments in particle physics.” —Nature Get it here: https://amzn.to/3oh48uZ COMING SOON!!! Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality by Frank Wilczek 1/12/21 One of our great contemporary scientists reveals the ten profound insights that illuminate what everyone should know about the physical world. In Fundamentals, Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek offers the reader a simple yet profound exploration of reality based on the deep revelations of modern science. With clarity and an infectious sense of joy, he guides us through the essential concepts that form our understanding of what the world is and how it works. Through these pages, we come to see our reality in a new way–bigger, fuller, and stranger than it looked before. BUY IT HERE: https://amzn.to/37v5jAg Brian Keating’s most popular Youtube Videos: Eric Weinstein: https://youtu.be/YjsPb3kBGnk?sub_confirmation=1 Jim Simons: https://youtu.be/6fr8XOtbPqM?sub_confirmation=1 Noam Chomsky: https://youtu.be/Iaz6JIxDh6Y?sub_confirmation=1 Sabine Hossenfelder: https://youtu.be/V6dMM2-X6nk?sub_confirmation=1 Sarah Scoles: https://youtu.be/apVKobWigMw Stephen Wolfram: https://youtu.be/nSAemRxzmXM Host Brian Keating: ‍♂️ Twitter at https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

0:07.0

Welcome, Professor Frank Wiltschik.

0:12.0

Author of a beautiful question and we'll be talking about this book but also his upcoming book called Fundamentals.

0:18.0

How are you today, Frank?

0:20.0

I'm great and doing very well in this kind of self-imposed quarantine in Concord, Massachusetts.

0:27.6

Yes, it's your my second friend from the eastern eastern from the outskirts of Boston shall we say after

0:36.9

Shelley Glashow was on last week and I want to then I'm going to be welcoming your

0:42.0

colleague Ray Weiss next week, so I want to encourage people to subscribe to the channel.

0:46.7

We're getting a lot of great interviews.

0:48.0

We had Sheldon Glashow.

0:49.6

I talked to your rival, cross-town rival, Comeron-Vafa, two weeks ago, and that'll be coming out soon.

0:55.0

And then Ray Weiss and Barry Barrett.

0:57.3

So please stay tuned to the Into the Impossible podcast.

1:00.1

But first, we're going to start with this book a beautiful question which I found quite beautiful and we were just remarking before we went live about the choice of covers. I always joke I always judge books by their covers. but in this case, as in many cases, first of all, this

1:15.7

book has two covers, it has a beautiful outer dust jacket, which I'm going to dispense with,

1:20.0

because how much dust do people really have like flying around their libraries.

1:24.0

I've never understood the dust jack, but I do know that if you don't have a dust jacket, the book is worth a lot less.

1:29.2

And here we see in beautiful inner cover depicting constellations.'s my territory we're going to talk

1:34.3

about that all sorts of fun stuff today with Frank Wiltschak winner of 2004 co-recipient

1:40.6

in 2004 Nobel Prize and we're going to talk about that event but first Frank

1:45.4

I listen to the audiobook the audiobook has 260 chapters and I want to point out to you

1:52.0

that the the new testament only has 240 chapters

...

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