Beautiful Question: In Pursuit of the Hidden Logic of the Universe A

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Is the world a work of art?

Artists and scientists throughout human history have pondered this age-old 'beautiful question', and in this scientific tour de force, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Frank Wilczek argues that beauty is the fundamental organizing principle of the entire universe. As he reveals in A Beautiful Question, the universe embodies beautiful forms - forms whose hallmarks are symmetry, harmony, balance and proportion - and the quest for beauty has always been at the heart of scientific pursuit.

In a book that stretches from the ancient Greeks to the deep waters of twentieth century physics to the present day, Wilczek explores just how intertwined our ideas about beauty and art are with our scientific understanding of the cosmos, from the infinitesimal to the infinite. In the process, he traces the bright lines of thought connecting Pythagoras's triangles to Plato's solids and Newton's classical equations to Einstein's spooky ones. As he shows us, the equations for atoms and light are almost literally the same equations that govern musical instruments and sound; the subatomic particles that are responsible for most of our mass are determined by simple geometric symmetries.

Gorgeously illustrated, A Beautiful Question is a mind-shifting book that braids the age-old quest for beauty and the age-old quest for truth into a thrilling synthesis - the universe wants to be beautiful.