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

by Wilczek, Frank

• ISBN13: 9780465018956
• ISBN10: 0465018955
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-03-09
• Publisher: Basic Books

Summary

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.

Author Biography

Currently the Herman Feshbach Professor of Physics at MIT, Frank Wilczek won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2004. 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.

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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