Search results for ""author frank wilczek""

With a contribution from Betsy DevineThe fantastic reality that is modern physics is open for your exploration, guided by one of its primary architects and interpreters, Nobel Prize winner Frank Wilczek.Some jokes, some poems, and extracts from wife Betsy Devine's sparkling chronicle of what it's like to live through a Nobel Prize provide easy entertainment. There's also some history, some philosophy, some exposition of frontier science, and some frontier science, for your lasting edification.49 pieces, including many from Wilczek's award-winning Reference Frame columns in Physics Today, and some never before published, are gathered by style and subject into a dozen chapters, each with a revealing, witty introduction.Profound ideas, presented with style: What could be better? Enjoy.

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A Nobel Prize-winning physicist argues that beauty is the fundamental organizing principle for the entire universeIn this scientific tour de force, world-class physicist Frank Wilczek argues that beauty is at the heart of the logic of the universe. As the quest to find the beauty embodied in the universe has connected all scientific pursuit, from Pythagoras to Einstein, Wilczek shows us just how deeply intertwined our ideas about beauty and art are with our understanding of the cosmos. A Beautiful Question is a mind-expanding book combining the age-old human quest for beauty with the age-old human quest for truth.

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One of our great contemporary scientists reveals the ten profound insights that illuminate what everyone should know about the physical worldIn 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.Synthesizing basic questions, facts, and dazzling speculations, Wilczek investigates the ideas that form our understanding of the universe: time, space, matter, energy, complexity, and complementarity. He excavates the history of fundamental science, exploring what we know and how we know it, while journeying to the horizons of the scientific world to give us a glimpse of what we may soon discover. Brilliant, lucid, and accessible, this celebration of human ingenuity and imagination will expand your world and your mind.

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Devoted to sharing their own delight and awe before the fundamental mysteries of the cosmos, Frank Wilczek (winner of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics) and science writer Betsy Devine also have a serious purpose: to reveal to the lay reader how a heightened perception can respond to timeless themes of the physical universe. For example, they show that even the most exotic theories always confirm that physical laws are precisely the same throughout the universe, and they explain how we have learned that the most massive molten stars and the tiniest frozen particles are in physical harmony. In their descriptions of the workings of the half-known universe, Wilczek and Devine bring all of us face to face with the beauty of eternal order and the inevitability of rational ends and beginnings.

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When mathematician Hermann Weyl decided to write a book on philosophy, he faced what he referred to as "conflicts of conscience"--the objective nature of science, he felt, did not mesh easily with the incredulous, uncertain nature of philosophy. Yet the two disciplines were already intertwined. In Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Science, Weyl examines how advances in philosophy were led by scientific discoveries--the more humankind understood about the physical world, the more curious we became. The book is divided into two parts, one on mathematics and the other on the physical sciences. Drawing on work by Descartes, Galileo, Hume, Kant, Leibniz, and Newton, Weyl provides readers with a guide to understanding science through the lens of philosophy. This is a book that no one but Weyl could have written--and, indeed, no one has written anything quite like it since.

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