The Lightness of Being: Mass, Ether, and the Unification of Forces

by Wilczek, Frank

• ISBN13: 9780465003211
• ISBN10: 0465003214
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-08-25
• Publisher: Perseus Books Group

Summary

Physicist' understanding of the essential nature of reality changed radically over the past quarter century. Frank Wilczek has played a lead role in establishing the new paradigms. Transcending the clash and mismatch of older ideas about what matter is, and what space is, Wilczek presents here some brilliant and clear syntheses. Space is a dynamic material, the engine of reality; matter is a subtle pattern of disturbance in that material.Extraordinarily readable and authoritative, The Lightness of Being is the first book to unwrap these exciting new ideas for the general public. It explores their implications for basic questions about space, mass, energy, and the longed-for possibility of a fully unified theory of Nature. Along the way, Wilczek presents new perspectives on many strange aspects of our fantastic universe. Pointing toward new directions where the great discoveries in fundamental physics are likely to come, he envisions a new Golden Age in physics.

Author Biography

Frank Wilczek won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2004 for work that he did as a twenty-one-year-old graduate student. His 1989 book, Longing for the Harmonies, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Wilczek’s work has been anthologized in Best American Science Writing and The Norton Anthology of Light Verse. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he is currently the Herman Feshbach Professor of Physics at MIT.

Table of Contents

About the Title	p. ix
Reader's Guide	p. xi
The Origin of Mass
Getting to It	p. 3
Newton's Zeroth Law	p. 11
Einstein's Second Law	p. 18
What Matters for Matter	p. 22
The Hydra Within	p. 26
The Bits Within the Its	p. 32
Symmetry Incarnate	p. 58
The Grid (Persistence of Ether)	p. 73
Computing Matter	p. 112
The Origin of Mass	p. 128
Music of the Grid: A Poem in Two Equations	p. 133
Profound Simplicity	p. 135
The Feebleness of Gravity
Is Gravity Feeble? Yes, in Practice	p. 145
Is Gravity Feeble? No, in Theory	p. 148
The Right Question	p. 151
A Beautiful Answer	p. 152
Is Beauty Truth?
Unification: The Siren's Song	p. 163
Unification: Through a Glass, Darkly	p. 177
Truthification	p. 182
Unification SUSY	p. 185
Anticipating a New Golden Age	p. 192
Epilogue: A Smooth Pebble, a Pretty Shell	p. 199
Acknowledgments	p. 205
Particles Have Mass, the World Has Energy	p. 207
The Multilayered, Multicolored Cosmic Superconductor	p. 211
From "Not Wrong" to (Maybe) Right	p. 217
Glossary	p. 221
Notes	p. 243
Illustration Credits	p. 259
Index	p. 261
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