On the work table of Frank Wilczek (1951) is a model of an archeopteryx. Not necessarily what you would expect from a professor and Nobel laureate in theoretical physics. Unfortunately, he can’t show it during our zoom talk, but most of the time the “primal bird” reminds Wilczek of his “place in the timeline of the human mind,” he says. The archeopteryx was the link between dinosaurs and birds. And so are contemporary scientists, according to Wilczek. “Modern man is learning to fly just a little; better ‘birds’ will come.”
He then elaborates on this in a characteristically long, and sometimes faltering sentence: “The idea that I have internalized in natural science over the course of my life, for what it’s worth, is that each human being is only one small part of the humanity, both in time and space, and that humanity is on a small planet in any galaxy and that generations after us will discover and do things through bioengineering or artificial intelligence or whatever new technology where what we are doing now will stand out as child’s play.”
Closed person
That doesn’t mean Wilczek expects a hard break, though. We have already embarked on the road to that ‘cyborg status’ a long time ago, Wilczek believes. He points to his glasses. On his watch that also counts his steps and relays messages. On GPS systems that prevent us from getting lost. And to the fact that labor power and raw materials from all over the world come together in, for example, such a smart watch. People and technology have long been closely intertwined.
What also speaks from Wilczek’s vision is modesty about his own place in the whole. And just such ‘modest astonishment’ or ‘wonderful modesty’ speaks from his book Fundamentals. At the request of his friends, Wilczek wanted to show what physics entails. He does this by exploring ten observations in thematic chapters. Such as that there is plenty of ‘stuff’ – plenty of time, space, matter and energy – to make a cosmos, but that the list of ingredients itself is short. Or that very few laws of nature are needed to ‘make’ an immense, dynamic cosmos, while at the same time those laws of nature fail to explain the local richness in variation, as on Earth.
I’m too young to look back
Wilczek rarely uses superlatives. Nor does he need much ado. And unlike some famous colleagues, he doesn’t sprinkle anecdotes about how he was captivated by physics as a child or overtaken by eureka feelings. He laughs a little when I say he seems averse to it. “I’m still too young to look back.” And perhaps, he continues more seriously, “I am a closed person by nature. I had to learn to talk to people, to communicate.” The main thing, of course, is that Fundamentals had to revolve around the ideas from physics – and “they are more interesting than myself.”
miracle
Not surprisingly, then, “contemplating with deep awe the pinnacles of what generations of scientists and engineers have accomplished” has given Wilczek great pleasure, as he writes in the book. The most amazing thing is that it is possible to fathom nature at all. The fact that the world is comprehensible is a miracle, Einstein once said. And Wilczek is one of the people who don’t just want to accept this ‘comprehensibility’, but also want to demonstrate it – through reflection and experiments.
He already did this in the 1970s by describing, together with David Gross, the strong interaction that binds quarks together to, among other things, the protons and neutrons in atomic nuclei. He received a Nobel Prize for this in 2004 with Gross and with David Politzer, who independently came to the same description.
Eight years later, in 2012, a hunch during a crystal class sparked the start of a rich new field of research. In crystals, atoms are arranged according to patterns that repeat themselves over and over in space. Would there be (quantum) systems, Wilczek wondered at the time, in which atoms or electrons move according to fixed, repeating patterns in time? The ‘time crystals’ that he subsequently ‘designed’ on paper have since been made in all kinds of places in the world.
It is better to make certain statements about something small and leave the rest to those who come after you
And in between, around 1977, Wilczek proposed a particle as a candidate for the invisible, ‘dark’ matter that helps shape galaxies and the cosmos. He named it axion, after a well-known washing powder, because it may be able to wash away the ‘misunderstood stain of dark matter’. In 1982 he predicted the existence of ‘quasi-particles’ that play a role in the quantum-hall effect, which occurs in strong magnetic fields at extremely low temperatures. He called them Anyons, after ‘anything goes’.
What all these subjects share is that Wilczek ignores grandiose, abstract and difficult questions to answer and invariably tries to align his theoretical research with experiments. It is not without reason that he also quotes in his book that other great physicist, Sir Isaac Newton, who once wrote that “it is far better to make certain statements about something small and leave the rest to those who come after you than to make conjectures about the whole, without ever being sure.”
Likewise, he cites the famous statement in which Newton compared his own work to playing on the seashore, occasionally stumbling upon a pebble or shell that was smoother or more beautiful than the rest, while a great ocean of truth lay before him. “Some think Newton was falsely modest here,” Wilczek says, “but I think he meant it.” And it touches on how he sees it himself. “Being modest is correct,” he says with a slightly mocking laugh.
Modesty and self-respect
Wilczek also sees that there is a downside to all that wonder and admiration for the world and the cosmos. Students hearing about the immense structures in the cosmos; children in bed thinking about infinity; people looking at the stars in the otherwise cold and empty universe: it is not so difficult to feel yourself insignificant. “The universe swallows me like a particle of dust,” philosopher Blaise Pascal once wrote.
But the great thing is that Wilczek’s book offers a counterbalance to that, and he bounces when we talk about it. Somewhere halfway through the book he calculates how many images and thoughts an average person can evoke and develop in a lifetime. There are soon one to a hundred billion and that can be compared, although Wilczek does not do that in the book itself, with the number of stars in the Milky Way. “I didn’t check to see if it was calculated before, but it was a revelation for me,” he says now. „It shows beautifully what Walt Whitman wrote in ‘Song of myself’: I am tall; I contain multiples.”
The cosmic scales only offer half the story
It also shows that there is no need to feel insignificant, even in the light of the stars. “The cosmic scales only tell half the story. The other half is that we have plenty of time compared to the units of time it takes to process information. Or well, it would be nice to have even more time, but it’s a gift that we already have so much time. A generous gift, because we didn’t have to do anything for it.” Indeed, “modesty is right, but with self-respect.”
Ocean
Such observations, which are more or less indirectly reflected in the text, make the book personal, even if the anecdotes are lacking. And they convinced Wilczek that natural science can “provide perspective on philosophical, moral and religious questions,” as he puts it. Take the fact that people can never perceive without intervention. It is a theorem from physics, as Wilczek points out dryly. “But it also contains,” he goes on to say, “a piece of wisdom to keep in mind in other areas. Observing is never something passive and always goes hand in hand with interaction. So the best way to learn something is to interact with it, but as you do that you change it. It pays to think about that tension between observation and interaction.”
And yes, insights like this also changed the nature of science itself, of course. But if that’s the case, then sociological changes are just as important, Wilczek believes. Compared to Newton’s time and about two centuries after that “there are many more scientists who know a lot more and that requires different things: as a student and starting scientist you have to invest much more in acquiring knowledge and getting to know the research tools; there is much more competition, but there are also many more opportunities for collaboration…” At the same time, he hesitates for a moment, “everything is perhaps not so different from moment to moment and from day to day: you are still looking for the interesting pebbles,” laughs, “and a great undiscovered ocean is still at your feet.”
Fundaments – ten keys to reality is in the Netherlands appeared at Uitgeverij Nieuwezijds as Fundamental – Ten Keys to Reality. Margriet van der Heijden checked the translation for the content and studied Wilczek’s work a long time ago during her PhD research, but does not earn anything from the sale of the book.
A version of this article also appeared in NRC Handelsblad on 31 December 2021
A version of this article also appeared in NRC in the morning of December 31, 2021
#light #stars #insignificant