Frank Wilczek

1951– · American theoretical physicist

Topics: physics, learning, science, creativity

• We have heard that nature can sing some strange and unfamiliar songs. In coming to appreciate these songs, we develop a heightened perception... leavened by an admixture of our own creation...

  — Frank Wilczek

• If the “universe” contains everything that exists, what can be outside it? If the answer is “Things that don’t exist”, then “multiverse” becomes an idea in the domain of psychology, not physics.

  — Frank Wilczek

• If you don’t have all the clues, you can still do parts of the puzzle. There may be huge parts of the puzzle that we don’t even know about...It means that future generations can have the same kind of fun that we’re having.

  — Frank Wilczek

• The “Copernican Principle” or “Cosmic Mediocrity”... states, basically, that Earth does not occupy a privileged place in the universe. Universality asserts more, namely that there are no privileged places or times.

  — Frank Wilczek

• What should be most significant to us are not physical artifacts, but the meaning they embody. ...whenever we create paintings, songs, poems, books, computer programs—or ideas in the minds of children—we do something of this sort.

  — Frank Wilczek

• An ordinary mistake is one that leads to a dead end, while a profound mistake is one that leads to progress. Anyone can make an ordinary mistake, but it takes a genius to make a profound mistake.

  — Frank Wilczek

• It is delightful in itself when we are able to interpret features of the present as signs confirming our understanding of the past.

  — Frank Wilczek

• In the past scientists have repeatedly reached “intellectual closure” on inadequate pictures of the universe, and underestimated its scale.

  — Frank Wilczek

• Knowing how to calculate something is not the same as understanding it. Having a computer to calculate the origin of mass for us may be convincing, but is not satisfying. Fortunately we can understand it too.

  — Frank Wilczek

• [S]ome scientists focus on ideal beauty, others on empirical truth. My own approach, following a great tradition going back to Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler, has been to use beauty as a guide to truth.

  — Frank Wilczek

• The happy coincidences between life’s requirements and nature’s choices of parameter-values might be just a series of flukes, but one could be forgiven for beginning to suspect that something deeper is at work. That suspicion is the first deep root of anthropic reasoning.

  — Frank Wilczek

• The answer to the ancient question "Why is there something rather than nothing?" would then be that ‘nothing’ is unstable.

  — Frank Wilczek

• The whole idea of science is really to listen to nature, in her own language, as part of a continuing dialogue.

  — Frank Wilczek

• In science... the ultimate judges are not experts but experiments.

  — Frank Wilczek

• As the idea of permanence of objects has faded, the idea of permanence of physical laws has become better established and more powerful.

  — Frank Wilczek