43 Quotes by Frank Wilczek

The answer to the ancient question Why is there something rather than nothing would be that nothingis unstable.

Many of my heroes, like Galileo, Maxwell, Newton and, less explicitly, Einstein thought what they were doing was finding out what God is. All of them had this inspiration that if you want to find out what God is, you have to look at his work.

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.

In short: the space of color information is infinite-dimensional, but we perceive, as color, only a three-dimensional surface, onto which those infinite dimensions project.

Quantum fields fill all all space, and the quantum electric and magnetic fields obey Maxwell’s equations. Nevertheless, when you observe the quantum fields, you find their energy packaged in discrete units: photons.

The brain rewards us for interacting with beautiful things. In this way, evolution wants to encourage us to do what is good for us.

The legendary Danish physicist Niels Bohr distinguished two kinds of truths. An ordinary truth is a statement whose opposite is a falsehood. A profound truth is a statement whose opposite is also a profound truth.

Subtle is the Lord, but malicious She is not.

Supersymmetry, if correct, will be a profound new embodiment of beauty in the world. Because the transformations of supersymmetry turn substance particles into force particles, and vice versa, supersymmetry can explain, based on symmetry, why neither of those things can exist without the other: Both are the same thing, seen from different perspectives. Supersymmetry reconciles apparent opposites, in the spirit of yin-yang.