A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature's Deep Design

This book explores what physicist Frank Wilczek calls “the beautiful question”: does the universe embody (as in, physically manifest) beautiful ideas? En route to his answer, Wilczek gives a crash-course in physics from Pythagoras and Plato to modern day quantum mechanics. Written in an accessibly poetic scientific vernacular, he brings the music of physics, philosophy, art, chemistry, and biology into concert via symmetry, which seems to be synonymous with “beautiful.” That is what bothered me most about this meditation; “beautiful” is never defined in a satisfying way. While I loved the interdisciplinary approach to the question, without a clear premise I couldn't understand exactly what we were working towards. And with that lack of direction, I lost focus - right around the discussion of quantum physics, which (at least, to me) is fundamentally difficult to grasp, no matter how good a writer is (and Wilczek is a wonderful writer!). Then I got bored and confused, and mostly skimmed and looked at the color plate like the good right-brainer I am. I'm sure if I had more motivation to grasp the more complex physics, I could... but I just wanted enough to appreciate the poetry of it. And I did. But, because the question was never clear to me, the answer left me unsatisfied.