- Wilczek, Frank.
Fantastic Realities.
Singapore: World Scientific, 2006.
ISBN 981-256-655-4.
-
The author won the
2004
Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of “asymptotic
freedom” in the strong interaction of quarks and gluons, which
laid the foundation of the modern theory of Quantum Chromodynamics
(QCD) and the Standard Model of particle physics. This book is an
anthology of his writing for general and non-specialist scientific
audiences over the last fifteen years, including eighteen of his
“Reference Frame” columns from
Physics Today and
his Nobel prize autobiography and lecture.
I had eagerly anticipated reading this book. Frank Wilczek and his
wife Betsy Devine are co-authors of the 1988 volume
Longing for the Harmonies,
which I consider to be one of the best works of science
popularisation ever written, and whose “theme and variation”
structure I adopted for my contemporary paper
“The New
Technological Corporation”. Wilczek is not only a
brilliant theoretician, he has a tremendous talent for explaining
the arcana of quantum mechanics and particle physics in lucid
prose accessible to the intelligent layman, and his command of
the English language transcends pedestrian science writing and
sometimes verges on the poetic, occasionally crossing the
line: this book contains six original poems!
The collection includes five book reviews, in a section
titled “Inspired, Irritated, Inspired”, the author's
reaction to the craft of reviewing books, which he describes as
“like going on a blind date to play Russian roulette”
(p. 305). After finishing this 500 page book, I must
sadly report that my own experience can be summed up as
“Inspired, Irritated, Exasperated”. There is
inspiration aplenty and genius on display here, but you're left
with the impression that this is a quickie book assembled by throwing
together all the popular writing of a Nobel laureate and rushed out
the door to exploit his newfound celebrity. This is not something you
would expect of World Scientific, but the content of the book argues
otherwise.
Frank Wilczek writes frequently for a variety of audiences on topics
central to his work: the running of the couplings in the Standard
Model, low energy supersymmetry and the unification of forces, a
possible SO(10) grand unification of fundamental particles, and
lattice QCD simulation of the mass spectrum of mesons and hadrons.
These are all fascinating topics, and Wilczek does them justice here.
The problem is that with all of these various articles collected in
one book, he does them justice again, again, and
again. Four illustrations: the lattice QCD mass spectrum, the
experimentally measured running of the strong interaction coupling,
the SO(10) particle unification chart, and the unification of forces
with and without supersymmetry, appear and are discussed three
separate times (the latter four times) in the text; this gets
tedious.
There is sufficient wonderful stuff in this book to justify reading
it, but don't feel duty-bound to slog through the nth
repetition of the same material; a diligent editor could easily cut at
least a third of the book, and probably close to half without losing
any content. The final 70 pages are excerpts from
Betsy Devine's Web
log recounting the adventures which began with that early morning
call from Sweden. The narrative is marred by the occasional snarky
political comment which, while appropriate in a faculty wife's blog,
is out of place in an anthology of the work of a Nobel laureate who
scrupulously avoids mixing science and politics, but still provides an
excellent inside view of just what it's like to win and receive a
Nobel prize.
August 2006 