Quantum beauty: real and ideal
Name
quantumBeautyLecture10.pdf
Description
Accepted version
Size
3.27 MB
Format
Unknown
Checksum (MD5)
f3b70c771239627f6a109765f9c251ba
Author(s)
Wilczek, Frank
Date Issued
June 2014
Journal
Beauty
Publisher
Cambridge University Press
Citation
Wilczek, Frank. "Quantum beauty: real and ideal."
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
© Darwin College, 2013. When I was asked to talk about quantum beauty I was a little startled, because the beauty of quantum theory is something that practising physicists, in the course of their work, rarely think about or mention. But when I gave the idea a chance, it really caught my imagination. And that’s why I’m here. Quantum beauty really is a wonderful, true thing to talk about. I’m going to sneak up on quantum beauty by putting it in historical context. The right context, I think, is a broader question: Does the world embody beautiful ideas? That is a question that people have thought about for a long time. Its intellectual history deserves volumes and syllabi. Here, though, I want to keep things brief and entertaining, so I shall spin a simple tale of heroes. Pythagoras and Plato intuited that the world should embody beautiful ideas; Newton and Maxwell demonstrated how the world could embody beautiful ideas, in specific impressive cases. Finally, in the twentieth century in modern physics, and especially in quantum physics, we find a definitive answer: Yes! - the world does embody beautiful ideas.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Physics
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9781139342421.004
