This is a podcast extra from nature, hosted by Adam Levy.

Is our universe beautiful? Is there beauty in its underlying physics, just as we see beauty in a Monet painting or a natural landscape?

I'm in the studio with Frank Wilcheckek, theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate.

Frank has just published a book called

A Beautiful Question, Finding Nature's Deep Design.

In it, he asks, does the world embody beautiful ideas?

In other words, are the fundamental laws of physics

that describe our universe beautiful?

Frank, what initially prompted you to ask this question?

It grew out of a lecture that I gave at Cambridge University at Darwin College.

They were having a series on beauty, and they asked me to talk about quantum beauty.

So I did, and then I took it to heart.

It started resonating in my mind. It's a challenge to relate quantum to beauty. And I got to thinking,

you know, it really does make sense. And it's something that one can convey visually as well and gives unusual ways of looking

at things.

And I found myself just getting deeper and deeper and ultimately revisiting questions that got

me into science in the first place.

Now, I don't want to spoil the whole book, but I think that

for most people who know you and know about the subject, they might suspect that you feel

the universe does indeed operate in a beautiful way. Well, yes, not only do I feel that, but I think

I've demonstrated it's not just a lot of loose talk. I have definite documentation and ideas about what the world is,

on the one hand, and one can get evidence about what beauty is by studying the history of art

...