Frank Wilczek Quotes

#1. Transient and Eternal
The state of the world is in flux, and every object within it is subject to change.
Concepts live outside of time and, because All Things Are Number, liberate us from it.

Frank Wilczek

#2. If an energetic and powerful Creator made the world, it could be that what moved Him - or Her, or Them, or It - to create was precisely an impulse to make something beautiful.

Frank Wilczek

#3. 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

#4. When religion talks about our aspirations and our sense of morality, I do not believe that science can contradict it. However, when religion contradicts science on matters of fact, religion must yield.

Frank Wilczek

#5. 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.

Frank Wilczek

#6. 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.

Frank Wilczek

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

Frank Wilczek

#8. I went off to college planning to major in math or philosophy
of course, both those ideas are really the same idea.

Frank Wilczek

#9. I'm convinced that art and science activate the same parts of the brain.

Frank Wilczek

#10. The main point is that quantum reality is REALLY, REALLY BIG. We'll build up a toy model that describes social life among the spins of just five particles, and we'll discover that it fills out a space of thirty-two dimensions.

Frank Wilczek

#11. If you don't make mistakes, you're not working on hard enough problems. And that's a mistake.

Frank Wilczek

#12. 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.

Frank Wilczek

#13. In physics, you don't have to go around making trouble for yourself - nature does it for you.

Frank Wilczek

#14. Two obsessions are the hallmarks of Nature's artistic style:
Symmetry- a love of harmony, balance, and proportion
Economy- satisfaction in producing an abundance of effects from very limited means

Frank Wilczek

#15. I believe that everything you've said is not even wrong.

Frank Wilczek

#16. 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

#17. The human mind is our ultimate sense organ. Mind has discovered that there are invisible infinities hidden in light. Our perception of color projects the doubly infinite-dimensional space of physical color onto the three-dimensional wall of our inner Cave.

Frank Wilczek

#18. In physics, your solution should convince a reasonable person. In math, you have to convince a person who's trying to make trouble. Ultimately, in physics, you're hoping to convince Nature. And I've found Nature to be pretty reasonable.

Frank Wilczek

#19. The answer to the ancient question 'Why is there something rather than nothing?' would then be that 'nothing' is unstable.

Frank Wilczek