Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality
Review of book by Frank Wilczek
This is another way to look at the elephant.
The blind men had different ideas about the elephant. And the Universe is a very big elephant. So, it’s natural that today’s physicists have different ideas about the nature of reality.
I enjoy the works of Carlo Rovelli, Brian Greene, and Lisa Randall, all of whom cover this same territory — from elementary particles to galaxies, and from the beginning to the end of time.
I found Helgoland by Rovelli particularly compelling with its concept that everything is connected to everything. But the works of these four articulate physicists are complementary. As Wilczek notes (p. 218), “Different, even incompatible, ways of analyzing the same thing can offer valid insights.” Don’t settle for one. Read them all.
I take issue with Wilczek’s basic and unfounded assumption that “one finds the same sorts of substances, organized in the same sorts of ways, spread uniformly over the visible universe, in vast abundance.” p. 22 And again on p. 109"… we conclude that the same laws operate upon the same basic materials everywhere in the universe and throughout its history.”
He’s a Platonist, with with faith in the power of “ideas.” “To experience the deep harmony between two different universes — the universe of beautiful ideas and the universe of physical behavior was for me a spiritual awakening.” p. 76. He glories in the fact that at major junctures in the advance of science, the big new idea has come before the evidence that “proves” it.
It will be interesting to see if the pace of discovery speeds of slows when computer intelligence starts making discoveries by brute force, without the guidance of ideas, unfettered by notions of beauty and simplicity.
Nevertheless, this book is well-populated with well-stated, inspiring insights, such as:
“Can we consider ‘empty space’ itself to be a material, whose quasiparticles are our ‘elementary particles.’?” p 90
“…the division of experience into internal and external worlds comes to seem superficial.” p. 226
