Frank Wilczek: 50 Years Of Theoretical Physics

Frank Wilczek: 50 Years Of Theoretical Physics PDF Author: Antti Niemi
Publisher: World Scientific
ISBN: 9811255180
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
Frank Wilczek is one of the foremost theoretical physicists of the past half-century. He has made several fundamental contributions that shape our understanding of high energy physics, cosmology, condensed matter physics, and statistical physics. In all these fields his many discoveries continue to play a key role in shaping the direction of modern theoretical physics.Among Wilczek's major achievements is the discovery of asymptotic freedom, which predicts and explains the ultraviolet behavior of non-abelian gauge theories. The axion, which he co-discovered and named, has emerged as the prevalent candidate for explaining the origin of dark matter in the Universe. His invention of color-flavor locking explains chiral symmetry breaking in high density quantum chromodynamics. His introduction of fractional statistics and anyons are pivotal to our understanding of the fractional quantum Hall effect and form the building blocks of topological quantum computing. His invention of the time crystal concept has catalyzed extensive investigations of dynamical phases of physical systems.Frank Wilczek received the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of asymptotic freedom. He is also the recipient of several Prizes and honorary awards including the MacArthur Fellowship, the Lorentz Medal of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Lilienfeld Prize of the American Physical Society, the High Energy and Particle Physics Prize of the European Physical Society, and the King Faisal International Prize for Science of the King Faisal Foundation. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. He is also a foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the Royal Academy of Sciences in Sweden.He is currently the Herman Feshbach Professor of Physics at MIT Center for Theoretical Physics. He also holds a professorship at Stockholm University, is a Distinguished Professor at Arizona State University, and is the founding director of the Tsung-Dao Lee Institute and Chief Scientist of the Wilczek Quantum Center at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.This volume serves as a tribute to Frank Wilczek's legendary scientific contributions, commemorating his 70th birthday and the first 50 years of his career as a theoretical physicist. The contributors include several of his PhD students, close collaborators, and both past and present colleagues.

Frank Wilczek: 50 Years Of Theoretical Physics

Frank Wilczek: 50 Years Of Theoretical Physics PDF Author: Antti Niemi
Publisher: World Scientific
ISBN: 9811255180
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 352

Get Book

Book Description
Frank Wilczek is one of the foremost theoretical physicists of the past half-century. He has made several fundamental contributions that shape our understanding of high energy physics, cosmology, condensed matter physics, and statistical physics. In all these fields his many discoveries continue to play a key role in shaping the direction of modern theoretical physics.Among Wilczek's major achievements is the discovery of asymptotic freedom, which predicts and explains the ultraviolet behavior of non-abelian gauge theories. The axion, which he co-discovered and named, has emerged as the prevalent candidate for explaining the origin of dark matter in the Universe. His invention of color-flavor locking explains chiral symmetry breaking in high density quantum chromodynamics. His introduction of fractional statistics and anyons are pivotal to our understanding of the fractional quantum Hall effect and form the building blocks of topological quantum computing. His invention of the time crystal concept has catalyzed extensive investigations of dynamical phases of physical systems.Frank Wilczek received the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of asymptotic freedom. He is also the recipient of several Prizes and honorary awards including the MacArthur Fellowship, the Lorentz Medal of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Lilienfeld Prize of the American Physical Society, the High Energy and Particle Physics Prize of the European Physical Society, and the King Faisal International Prize for Science of the King Faisal Foundation. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. He is also a foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the Royal Academy of Sciences in Sweden.He is currently the Herman Feshbach Professor of Physics at MIT Center for Theoretical Physics. He also holds a professorship at Stockholm University, is a Distinguished Professor at Arizona State University, and is the founding director of the Tsung-Dao Lee Institute and Chief Scientist of the Wilczek Quantum Center at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.This volume serves as a tribute to Frank Wilczek's legendary scientific contributions, commemorating his 70th birthday and the first 50 years of his career as a theoretical physicist. The contributors include several of his PhD students, close collaborators, and both past and present colleagues.

The Lightness of Being

The Lightness of Being PDF Author: Frank Wilczek
Publisher: Basic Books (AZ)
ISBN: 0465003214
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
The 2004 Nobel Prize winner in physics offers this readable and authoritative work for the general public. It explores basic questions about space, mass, energy, and the longed-for possibility of a fully unified theory of nature.

Fundamentals

Fundamentals PDF Author: Frank Wilczek
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0735223890
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
“Fundamentals might be the perfect book for the winter of this plague year. . . . Wilczek writes with breathtaking economy and clarity, and his pleasure in his subject is palpable.” —The New York Times Book Review One of our great contemporary scientists reveals the ten profound insights that illuminate what everyone should know about the physical world In 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.

A Beautiful Question

A Beautiful Question PDF Author: Frank Wilczek
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0698195620
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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Book Description
Does the universe embody beautiful ideas? Artists as well as scientists throughout human history have pondered this “beautiful question.” With Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek as your guide, embark on a voyage of related discoveries, from Plato and Pythagoras up to the present. Wilczek’s groundbreaking work in quantum physics was inspired by his intuition to look for a deeper order of beauty in nature. In fact, every major advance in his career came from this intuition: to assume that the universe embodies beautiful forms, forms whose hallmarks are symmetry—harmony, balance, proportion—and economy. There are other meanings of “beauty,” but this is the deep logic of the universe—and it is no accident that it is also at the heart of what we find aesthetically pleasing and inspiring. Wilczek is hardly alone among great scientists in charting his course using beauty as his compass. As he reveals in A Beautiful Question, this has been the heart of scientific pursuit from Pythagoras, the ancient Greek who was the first to argue that “all things are number,” to Galileo, Newton, Maxwell, Einstein, and into the deep waters of twentiethcentury physics. Though the ancients weren’t right about everything, their ardent belief in the music of the spheres has proved true down to the quantum level. Indeed, Wilczek explores just how intertwined our ideas about beauty and art are with our scientific understanding of the cosmos. Wilczek brings us right to the edge of knowledge today, where the core insights of even the craziest quantum ideas apply principles we all understand. The equations for atoms and light are almost literally the same equations that govern musical instruments and sound; the subatomic particles that are responsible for most of our mass are determined by simple geometric symmetries. The universe itself, suggests Wilczek, seems to want to embody beautiful and elegant forms. Perhaps this force is the pure elegance of numbers, perhaps the work of a higher being, or somewhere between. Either way, we don’t depart from the infinite and infinitesimal after all; we’re profoundly connected to them, and we connect them. When we find that our sense of beauty is realized in the physical world, we are discovering something about the world, but also something about ourselves. Gorgeously illustrated, A Beautiful Question is a mind-shifting book that braids the age-old quest for beauty and the age-old quest for truth into a thrilling synthesis. It is a dazzling and important work from one of our best thinkers, whose humor and infectious sense of wonder animate every page. Yes: The world is a work of art, and its deepest truths are ones we already feel, as if they were somehow written in our souls.

The Road to Reality

The Road to Reality PDF Author: Roger Penrose
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0593315308
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 1136

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Book Description
**WINNER OF THE 2020 NOBEL PRIZE IN PHYSICS** The Road to Reality is the most important and ambitious work of science for a generation. It provides nothing less than a comprehensive account of the physical universe and the essentials of its underlying mathematical theory. It assumes no particular specialist knowledge on the part of the reader, so that, for example, the early chapters give us the vital mathematical background to the physical theories explored later in the book. Roger Penrose's purpose is to describe as clearly as possible our present understanding of the universe and to convey a feeling for its deep beauty and philosophical implications, as well as its intricate logical interconnections. The Road to Reality is rarely less than challenging, but the book is leavened by vivid descriptive passages, as well as hundreds of hand-drawn diagrams. In a single work of colossal scope one of the world's greatest scientists has given us a complete and unrivalled guide to the glories of the universe that we all inhabit. 'Roger Penrose is the most important physicist to work in relativity theory except for Einstein. He is one of the very few people I've met in my life who, without reservation, I call a genius' Lee Smolin

Longing for the Harmonies Themes and Variations From Modern Physi

Longing for the Harmonies Themes and Variations From Modern Physi PDF Author: Frank Wilczek
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393305968
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
"Occasionally, there comes along a popular science book that both scientists and non-scientist can read with pleasure and profit, and this is one."—The New Yorker 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.

50 Years of Yang-Mills Theory

50 Years of Yang-Mills Theory PDF Author: G. 't Hooft
Publisher: World Scientific
ISBN: 9812567143
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 498

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Book Description
On the 50th anniversary of YangOCoMills theory, this invaluable volume looks back at the developments and achievements in elementary particle physics that ensued from that beautiful idea. During the last five decades, Yang-Mills theory, which is undeniably the most important cornerstone of theoretical physics, has expanded widely. It has been investigated from many perspectives, and many new and unexpected features have been uncovered from this theory. In recent decades, apart from high energy physics, the theory has been actively applied in other branches of physics, such as statistical physics, condensed matter physics, nonlinear systems, etc. This makes the theory an indispensable topic for all who are involved in physics. An international team of experts, each of whom has left his mark on the developments of this remarkable theory, contribute essays or more detailed technical accounts to this volume. These articles highlight the new discoveries from the respective authorsOCO perspectives. The distinguished contributors are: S Adler, F A Bais, C Becchi, M Creutz, A De Rjula, B S DeWitt, F Englert, L D Faddeev, P Hasenfratz, R Jackiw, A Polyakov, V N Popov, R Stora, P van Baal, P van Nieuwenhuizen, S Weinberg, F Wilczek, E Witten, C N Yang. Included in each article are introductory and explanatory remarks by the editor, G OCOt Hooft, who is himself a major player in the development of Yang-Mills theory."

Proving Einstein Right

Proving Einstein Right PDF Author: S. James Gates,
Publisher: PublicAffairs
ISBN: 1541762231
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
A thrilling adventure story chronicling the perilous journey of the scientists who set out to prove the theory of relativity--the results of which catapulted Albert Einstein to fame and forever changed our understanding of the universe. In 1911, a relatively unknown physicist named Albert Einstein published his preliminary theory of gravity. But it hadn't been tested. To do that, he needed a photograph of starlight as it passed the sun during a total solar eclipse. So began a nearly decade-long quest by seven determined astronomers from observatories in four countries, who traveled the world during five eclipses to capture the elusive sight. Over the years, they faced thunderstorms, the ravages of a world war, lost equipment, and local superstitions. Finally, in May of 1919, British expeditions to northern Brazil and the island of Príncipe managed to photograph the stars, confirming Einstein's theory. At its heart, this is a story of frustration, faith, and ultimate victory--and of the scientists whose efforts helped build the framework for the big bang theory, catapulted Einstein to international fame, and shook the foundation of physics.

Existential Physics

Existential Physics PDF Author: Sabine Hossenfelder
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1984879456
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “An informed and entertaining guide to what science can and cannot tell us.” —The Wall Street Journal “Stimulating . . . encourage[s] readers to push past well-trod assumptions […] and have fun doing so.” —Science Magazine From renowned physicist and creator of the YouTube series “Science without the Gobbledygook,” a book that takes a no-nonsense approach to life’s biggest questions, and wrestles with what physics really says about the human condition Not only can we not currently explain the origin of the universe, it is questionable we will ever be able to explain it. The notion that there are universes within particles, or that particles are conscious, is ascientific, as is the hypothesis that our universe is a computer simulation. On the other hand, the idea that the universe itself is conscious is difficult to rule out entirely. According to Sabine Hossenfelder, it is not a coincidence that quantum entanglement and vacuum energy have become the go-to explanations of alternative healers, or that people believe their deceased grandmother is still alive because of quantum mechanics. Science and religion have the same roots, and they still tackle some of the same questions: Where do we come from? Where do we go to? How much can we know? The area of science that is closest to answering these questions is physics. Over the last century, physicists have learned a lot about which spiritual ideas are still compatible with the laws of nature. Not always, though, have they stayed on the scientific side of the debate. In this lively, thought-provoking book, Hossenfelder takes on the biggest questions in physics: Does the past still exist? Do particles think? Was the universe made for us? Has physics ruled out free will? Will we ever have a theory of everything? She lays out how far physicists are on the way to answering these questions, where the current limits are, and what questions might well remain unanswerable forever. Her book offers a no-nonsense yet entertaining take on some of the toughest riddles in existence, and will give the reader a solid grasp on what we know—and what we don’t know.

Fantastic Realities

Fantastic Realities PDF Author: Frank Wilczek
Publisher: World Scientific
ISBN: 981256649X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 533

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Book Description
The 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.