This is a book about fundamental lessons we can learn from a study of the physical world...To me, those fundamental lessons include much more than bare facts about how the physical world works. Those facts are both powerful and strangely beautiful, to be sure. But the style of thought that allowed us to discover them is a great achievement, too. And it’s important to consider what those fundamentals suggest about how we humans fit into the big picture.
In his preface to Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality, theoretical physicist, mathematician and Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek explains that his aim with this book is to “convey the central messages of modern physics as simply as possible” — and as valiant as his efforts seem to be, and as essentially interesting as I find the material, I’m afraid that these “central messages” conveyed “simply” did strain the limits of my comprehension. This might not be exactly the layman’s general interest science book that I hoped it would be, but Wilczek’s writing is straightforward, often engagingly personal, and he is obviously (and contagiously) filled with awe for what he does more perfectly understand about the underpinnings of reality. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
The complementarity between humility and self-respect is, I believe, the central message of our fundamentals. It recurs as a theme in many variations. The vastness of space dwarfs us, but we contain multitudes of neurons, and, of course, vastly more of the atoms that make up neurons. The span of cosmic history far exceeds a human lifetime, but we have time for immense numbers of thoughts. Cosmic energies transcend what a human commands, but we have ample power to sculpt our local environment and to participate actively in life among other humans. The world is complex beyond our ability to grasp, and rich in mysteries, but we know a lot, and are learning more. Humility is in order, but so is self-respect.
Also in the preface, Wilczek explains that as he “reflected on the material, two overarching themes occurred.” The first theme was abundance (as in the above passage) and the other was the need for humans to be “born again” in order to properly appreciate the universe (meaning to unlearn the separation between the self and the nonself that we all construct as babies). When I first studied Physics in high school, I could picture and work with the planetary model of the atom because it chimes with what is observable out in the universe; likewise, I could comprehend Newton’s explanation for gravity because of course an object falls down to earth because the planet’s mass is greater than that of an apple and exerts a greater force; these early theories of reality make sense to a brain that was trained to deal with the observable universe as filtered through human senses. But Schrodinger eventually replaced Bohr’s planetary model with one based on quantum mechanics, Einstein upended Newton with General Relativity, and modern physicists want to describe reality with mathematical equations instead of something concrete that the human mind can visualise — and I can only follow the math so far (and not leastwise because I resist the idea that all of life and mind and consciousness is an illusion sprung from an accidental area of density in a quantum field).
As for the fundamentals: They include the concepts of abundance (of space and time, matter and energy) and the fact that the universe is made up of very few ingredients, the fact that there are very few fundamental laws that govern them, and that complexity is an emergent quality of the universe’s base reality. So what does this say about humanity’s place in the universe? Early on, Wilczek quotes the ancient Greek philosopher (and first proponent of atomic theory) Democritus as having written in about 400 BC that human sensations are merely conventions, and “in truth there are only atoms and the void.” Turns out, Democritus was only wrong in thinking of atoms as the smallest units of matter.
According to our present best understanding, the primary properties of matter, from which all other properties can be derived, are these three:
Mass Charge Spin
That’s it. From a philosophical perspective, the key takeaways are that there are very few primary properties, and that they are things you can define and measure precisely. And also this: As Democritus anticipated, the connection of the primary properties — the deep structure of reality — to the everyday appearance of things is quite remote. While it seems to me too strong to say that sweet, bitter, hot, cold, and color are “conventions”, it is surely true that it takes quite some doing to trace those things — and the world of everyday experience more generally — to their origins in mass, charge, and spin.
All of matter (including us) is made up of these three properties, but “matter” itself is not the permanent state that we might imagine:
From forces we are led to fields, and from (quantum) fields, we are led to particles. From particles we are led to (quantum) fields, and from fields, we are led to forces. Thus, we come to understand that substance and force are two aspects of a common underlying reality.
And again, what does that mean about us?
Many once mysterious aspects of living things, such as how they derive their energy (metabolism), how they reproduce (heredity), and how they sense their environment (perception), (can now be understood) from the bottom up. For now we understand in considerable detail, how molecules — and ultimately, quarks, gluons, electrons, and photons — manage to accomplish those feats. They are complicated things that matter can do, by following the laws of physics. No more, and no less. These understandings do not subtract from the glory of life. Rather, they magnify the glory of matter.
Ahh, the glory of matter.
Matter, deeply understood, has ample room for minds. And so, also, it can be home to the internal worlds that minds house. There is both majestic simplicity and strange beauty in this unified view of the world. Within it, we must consider ourselves not as unique objects (“souls”), outside of the physical world, but rather as coherent, dynamic patterns in matter. It is an unfamiliar perspective. Were it not so strongly supported by the fundamentals of science, it would seem far-fetched. But it has the virtue of truth. And once embraced, it can come to seem liberating.
So, is there anything special about humans?
A special quality of humans, not shared by evolution or, as yet, by machines, is our ability to recognize gaps in our understanding and to take joy in the process of filling them in. It is a beautiful thing to experience the mysterious, and powerful, too.
I guess that’s something. I did like that Wilczek references many literary works alongside the scientific ones he cites (in particular, he seems to have a love for sci-fi: as with Robert Forward’s Dragon’s Egg or Olaf Stapledon’s Odd John), but the following didn’t quite warm my human heart:
The misery or evil of immortality is a common theme in myth and literature. The intended lesson: When it comes to longevity, be careful what you wish for. Frankly, I think this is sour grapes. The destruction of memory and learning by death is horrifying and wasteful. Extending the healthful human lifespan should be one of the main goals of science.
And I include the following just because it piqued my interest:
There is a quantity, usually written as t, which appears in our fundamental description of how change takes place in the physical world. It is also what people are talking about when they ask, “What time is it?” That is what time is. Time is what clocks measure, and everything that changes is a clock.
Again, I believe that Wilczek achieved what he set out to with Fundamentals, but having not been “born again”, I couldn’t quite get my mind wrapped around everything he laid out here; I seem stubbornly attached to reality as my senses interpret it (I can't help but prefer concepts that are analogous to those things I can see and touch), and more than that, I am stubbornly attached to the idea that there is something special about human consciousness. I do, however, wholeheartedly recommend this book — the ideas are complex but worth trying to understand; this is actually our reality after all.
