A Beautiful Question: finding nature's deep design

Speaker : Professor Frank Wilczek

Recorded on 8 July 2015 at Old Theatre, Old Building

In his new book, which he will discuss in this public lecture, world-class physicist and Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek argues that beauty is at the heart of the logic of the universe, a principle that had guided his pioneering work in quantum physics. As his book looks to demonstrate, this quest has also guided the work of all scientific pursuit in the western world, from Pythagoras and Plato to Galileo and Newton, Maxwell and Einstein. Indeed, Wilczek looks to show us just how deeply intertwined our ideas about beauty and art are with our scientific understanding of the cosmos. A Beautiful Question is the culmination of Wilczek’s life work, a work that looks to combine the age-old quest for beauty with the age-old quest for truth.

Frank Wilczek (@FrankWilczek) won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2004 for work he did as a graduate student at Princeton University, when he was 21 years old. He is the Herman Feshbach Professor of Physics at MIT.

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