Beauty Is Physics’ Secret Weapon

We recognize beauty when we see it, right? Michelangelo’s David, Machu Picchu, an ocean sunrise. Could we say the same about the cosmos itself? Frank Wilczek, a professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, thinks we can. And should. In his new book A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature’s Deep Design, Wilczek lays out his case for the elegance of mathematics and the coherence of nature’s underlying laws.

Wilczek won the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering, with David Gross and H. David Politzer, equations that govern one of the fundamental forces in physics, the strong interaction, which holds together quarks and gluons, and makes protons and neutrons. Their discovery of “asymptotic freedom” showed that as quarks get closer to each other, the charge between them grows weaker.

I love its weirdness and strangeness and the fact that it’s the way the world actually works.

Wilczek’s specialty is quantum theory, but the impact of his work has been apparent in cosmology—in the study of black holes, dark matter, and the age-old mystery of how something can arise out of nothing. Now 64, he has been seeking designs in nature since he was a young math student. “I liked playing with patterns and thinking about that kind of abstraction,” he says. “I was very interested in mathematical logic, which is a branch of philosophy, and the theory of how the mind works. I studied some neurobiology and computer science as I tried to figure out how abstract patterns map onto the workings of minds.”

You say there’s beauty in the design of nature. That seems to be a matter of aesthetics. Is it a scientific question?

It is a scientific question. The exact question I’m trying to address is whether the world embodies beautiful ideas.