[The physics Nobelist and author has not exactly found
religion—but that doesn’t mean he’s stopped looking]
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GOD, DARK MATTER AND FALLING CATS: A CONVERSATION WITH 2022 TEMPLETON
PRIZE WINNER FRANK WILCZEK  
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Zeeya Merali
May 11, 2022
Scientific American
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_ The physics Nobelist and author has not exactly found
religion—but that doesn’t mean he’s stopped looking _

Theoretical physicist and Nobel Prize laureate Frank Wilczek has won
the 2022 Templeton Prize. , Michael Clark

 

Frank Wilczek, a Nobel Prize–winning theoretical physicist and
author, has been announced as the recipient of the 2022 Templeton
Prize, which is valued at more than $1.3 million. The annual award
honors those “who harness the power of the sciences to explore the
deepest questions of the universe and humankind’s place and purpose
within it,” according to a press release from the John Templeton
Foundation. Previous recipients include scientists such as Jane
Goodall, Marcelo Gleiser and Martin Rees, as well as religious or
political leaders such as Mother Theresa and Desmond Tutu.

Wilczek’s Nobel-winning work traces back to the early 1970s, when he
and two colleagues devised a theory describing the behavior of
fundamental particles called quarks—a feat that proved crucial for
establishing the Standard Model of particle physics. He has also
proposed the existence of multiple new particles and entities. Some,
such as “time crystals” and “anyons,” have since been
discovered and appear promising for developing better quantum
computers. Another Wilczek prediction—the “axion”—remains
unconfirmed but is a leading candidate for dark matter, the invisible
substance thought to comprise the majority of mass in the universe. He
is also a prolific author, and in his recent books links his work as a
physicist with his contemplations on the inherent beauty of reality,
arguing that our universe embodies the most mathematically elegant
structures.

_Scientific American_ spoke with Wilczek about the interplay between
science and spirituality, recent reports that the Standard Model may
be “broken
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and his latest research involving the hunt for hypothetical particles
and the physics of falling cats.

[_An edited transcript of the interview follows._]

CONGRATULATIONS ON RECEIVING THE TEMPLETON PRIZE. WHAT DOES THIS AWARD
REPRESENT FOR YOU?

My exploratory, science-based efforts to address questions that are
often thought to be philosophical or religious are resonating. I’m
very grateful for that, and I’ve started to think about what it all
means.

One kind of “spiritual” awakening for me has been experiencing how
a dialogue with nature is possible—in which nature “talks back”
and sometimes surprises you and sometimes confirms what you imagined.
Vague hopes and concepts that were originally scribbles on paper
become experimental proposals and sometimes successful descriptions of
the world.

YOU DON’T NOW IDENTIFY WITH ANY PARTICULAR RELIGIOUS TRADITION, BUT
IN YOUR 2021 BOOK _FUNDAMENTALS: TEN KEYS TO REALITY_, YOU WROTE,
“IN STUDYING HOW THE WORLD WORKS, WE ARE STUDYING HOW GOD WORKS, AND
THEREBY _LEARNING WHAT GOD IS_.” WHAT DID YOU MEAN BY THAT?

The use of the word “God” in common culture is very loose. People
can mean entirely different things by it. For me, the unifying thread
is thinking big: thinking about how the world works, what it is, how
it came to be and what all that means for what we should do.

I chose to study this partly to fill the void that was left when I
realized I could no longer accept the dogmas of the Catholic Church
that had meant a lot to me as a teenager. Those dogmas include claims
about how things happen that are particularly difficult to reconcile
with science. But more importantly, the world is a bigger, older and
more alien place than the tribalistic account in the Bible. There are
some claims about ethics and attitudes about community that I do find
valuable, but they cannot be taken as pronouncements from “on
high.” I think I have now gathered enough wisdom and life experience
that I can revisit all this with real insight.

CAN YOU GIVE ME SOME SPECIFIC EXAMPLES OF HOW THE WISDOM YOU HAVE NOW
BUT DIDN’T HAVE EARLIER IN YOUR SCIENTIFIC CAREER HAS INFLUENCED
YOUR OUTLOOK?

“Complementarity
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says that you can’t use a single picture to answer all meaningful
questions. You may need very different descriptions, even descriptions
that are mutually incomprehensible or superficially contradictory.
This concept is absolutely necessary in understanding quantum
mechanics, where, for instance, you can’t make predictions about the
position and the momentum of an electron simultaneously. When I first
encountered Bohr’s ideas about taking complementarity beyond quantum
mechanics, I was not impressed. I thought it was borderline bullshit.
But I’ve come to realize that it is a much more general piece of
wisdom that promotes tolerance and mind expansion. There’s also the
scientific attitude that openness and honesty allow people to
flourish. It enhances the effectiveness of scientists to have a sort
of loving relationship with what they are doing because the work can
be frustrating and involves investing in learning some rather dry
material. And then there is the lesson of beauty: when you allow
yourself to use your imagination, the world repays with wonderful
gifts.

YOU WON A SHARE OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN PHYSICS IN 2004
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YOUR WORK ON UNDERSTANDING THE STRONG FORCE, WHICH BINDS SUBATOMIC
PARTICLES WITHIN THE ATOMIC NUCLEUS. THIS WORK FORMS PART OF THE
BACKBONE OF THE STANDARD MODEL. BUT THE STANDARD MODEL IS OF COURSE
INCOMPLETE BECAUSE IT DOESN’T ACCOUNT FOR GRAVITY OR DARK MATTER OR
THE “DARK ENERGY” THAT SEEMS TO BE POWERING THE ACCELERATING
EXPANSION OF THE UNIVERSE. MANY PHYSICISTS, INCLUDING YOURSELF,
CONSEQUENTLY BELIEVE WE WILL EVENTUALLY FIND EVIDENCE THAT ALLOWS US
TO CRAFT A SUCCESSOR TO OR EXTENSION OF THE STANDARD MODEL. IN APRIL
PHYSICISTS AT THE FERMI NATIONAL ACCELERATOR LABORATORY IN BATAVIA,
ILL., ANNOUNCED THAT THEY HAD MEASURED THE MASS OF AN ELEMENTARY
PARTICLE CALLED THE W BOSON TO BE SIGNIFICANTLY HEAVIER THAN
PREDICTED [[link removed]] BY
THE STANDARD MODEL. IS THIS AN EXCITING SIGN THAT THE STANDARD
MODEL’S REIGN IS APPROACHING ITS END
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I am skeptical. This is an impressive piece of work, but it’s an
attempt to do a high-precision measurement of the mass of an unstable
particle that decays very fast in exotic ways. And because the W boson
has a finite lifetime, according to quantum mechanics, it has an
uncertainty in mass. Just the fact that the measurement is so
complicated raises an eyebrow. And then, even more serious, is that
the result is not only discrepant with theoretical calculations but
also with previous experimental measurements. If there were a
compelling theoretical hypothesis suggesting that there should be this
discrepancy with the W boson mass but no other discrepancy with all
the other tests, that would be fantastic. But that’s not the case.
So, to me, the jury is still out.

ONE OF YOUR MOST RECENT SUCCESSES WAS PREDICTING THE EXISTENCE
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A NOVEL QUANTUM STATE OF MATTER THAT YOU DUBBED A “TIME CRYSTAL
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BECAUSE ITS PARTICLES EXHIBIT REPETITIVE BEHAVIOR—LIKE A SWINGING
PENDULUM—BUT WITHOUT CONSUMING ENERGY. HOW DID YOU COME UP WITH THE
IDEA?

Almost 10 years ago I was preparing to teach a course on symmetry, and
I thought, “Let’s think about crystal symmetry in more than just
3-D; let’s think about crystals that are periodic in time.”
Basically, time crystals are self-organized clocks, ones that are not
constructed but arise spontaneously because they want to be clocks.
Now, if you have systems that spontaneously want to move, this sounds
dangerously like a perpetual-motion machine, and that had scared
physicists away. But I have been given several injections of
confidence over my career, so I wasn’t afraid and jumped in where
angels fear to tread. I originally wanted to call it “spontaneous
breaking of time-translation symmetry,” but my wife Betsy Devine
said, “What the heck?!” So they became time crystals.

TIME CRYSTALS HAVE NOW BEEN CREATED IN THE LAB
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COMPUTER [[link removed]]. HOW
MIGHT THEY BE USEFUL?

The most promising application is to make new and better clocks that
are more portable and robust. Making accurate clocks is an important
frontier in physics; [they are] used in GPS, for example. It’s also
important to make clocks that are friendly to quantum mechanics
because quantum computers will need compatible clocks.

YOU HAVE A HABIT OF COMING UP WITH CATCHY NAMES. BACK IN THE 1970S,
YOU PROPOSED A HYPOTHETICAL NEW PARTICLE
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YOU CALLED THE “AXION”—INSPIRED BY A LAUNDRY DETERGENT—BECAUSE
ITS EXISTENCE WOULD CLEAN UP A MESSY TECHNICAL PROBLEM IN THE WORKINGS
OF PARTICLE PHYSICS. SINCE THEN, OTHER PHYSICISTS HAVE SUGGESTED THAT
AXIONS, IF THEY EXIST, HAVE JUST THE RIGHT PROPERTIES TO MAKE UP DARK
MATTER. HOW IS THE SEARCH FOR AXIONS PROGRESSING?

Axions are super exciting. It was totally unexpected to me at the
beginning that the theory was perfectly designed to explain the dark
matter, but that possibility has been gaining ground. That’s partly
because searches for the other leading dark matter candidates,
so-called WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles), have turned up
empty, so axions look better by comparison. And in the last few years,
there have been some truly promising ideas for detecting dark matter
axions. I came up with one with Stockholm University researchers Alex
Millar and Matt Lawson that uses a “metamaterial”
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material that has been engineered to process light in particular
ways—as a sort of “antenna” for axions. The ALPHA collaboration
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optimistic, bordering on confident, that within five to 10 years, we
will have definitive results.

And “axion” is now in the _Oxford English Dictionary. _When
you’re in the OED, you know you’ve arrived.

YOU ALSO COINED THE NAME OF ANOTHER NEW PARTICLE, THE “ANYON.” THE
STANDARD MODEL ALLOWS FOR TWO TYPES OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES:
“FERMIONS” (WHICH INCLUDE ELECTRONS) AND “BOSONS” (SUCH AS
PHOTONS OF LIGHT). THE ANYON IS A THIRD CATEGORY OF
“QUASIPARTICLE” THAT EMERGES THROUGH THE COLLECTIVE BEHAVIOR OF
GROUPS OF ELECTRONS IN CERTAIN QUANTUM SYSTEMS. YOU PREDICTED THIS
BACK IN 1984
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BUT IT’S ONLY BEEN
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WHAT’S THE LATEST NEWS ON ANYONS?

I thought it would take a few months to verify that you could have
anyons, but it took almost 40 years. During that time, there have been
literally thousands of papers about anyons, but very few were
experimental. People also realized that anyons could be useful as ways
of storing information—and that this could potentially be produced
on an industrial scale—giving rise to the field of “topological
quantum computing.” There have now been prototype experiments
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China and serious investment by Microsoft. Last month
Microsoft announced
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they have made the kind of anyon
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need to get the quantum-computing applications off the ground in a
serious way. So all these thousands of papers of theory are finally
making contact with practical reality and even technology.

YOU CLEARLY HAVE A KNACK FOR COMING UP WITH GROUNDBREAKING CONCEPTS IN
PHYSICS. DO YOU HAVE ANY OTHER REVOLUTIONARY IDEAS BREWING?

Yes, but I don’t want to jinx them by casually mentioning them here!
I’ll tell you something amusing I am working on, though: there’s
an abstract mathematical idea called “gauge symmetry” that
underpins particle physics. It’s a powerful tool, but it’s a
mystery as to why it is there. An interesting observation is that
gauge symmetry also arises in the description of the mechanics of
bodies that are squishy and can propel themselves. Amazingly, gauge
symmetry appears when you try and work out how a cat that falls out of
tree can manage to land on its feet or how divers avoid belly flops. I
realized this with [physicist] Al Shapere
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work I have been generalizing it in several directions. It’s a lot
of fun—and it might turn out to be profound.

AND FINALLY, WHAT ARE YOUR LONG-TERM HOPES FOR THE FUTURE OF SOCIETY?

Looking at big history reinforces cosmic optimism. I like to say that
God is a “work in progress.” Day-to-day, you can have
backsliding—pandemics, wars—but if you look at the overall trends,
they are extraordinarily positive. Things could go wrong, with nuclear
war or ecological catastrophe, but if we are careful as a species, we
can have a really glorious future. I view it as part of my mission in
the remainder of my life to try and point people toward futures that
are worthy of our opportunities and not to get derailed.

_ZEEYA MERALI is a freelance writer based in London and author of A
Big Bang in a Little Room._

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