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Frank Wilczek

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Frank Wilczek
Wilczek in 2004
Born
Frank Anthony Wilczek

(1951-05-15)May 15, 1951(age 73)
Mineola, New York,U.S.
EducationUniversity of Chicago(BS)
Princeton University(MA,PhD)
Known forAsymptotic freedom
Quantum chromodynamics
Particle statistics
Axionmodel
SpouseBetsy Devine
ChildrenAmity and Mira[1]
AwardsMacArthur Fellowship(1982)
Sakurai Prize(1986)
ICTP Dirac Medal(1994)
Lorentz Medal(2002)
Lilienfeld Prize(2003)
Nobel Prize in Physics(2004)
King Faisal Prize(2005)
Templeton Prize(2022)
Scientific career
FieldsPhysics
Mathematics
InstitutionsMIT
T. D. Lee Institute and Wilczek Quantum Center,Shanghai Jiao Tong University
Arizona State University
Stockholm University
ThesisNon-abelian gauge theories and asymptotic freedom(1974)
Doctoral advisorDavid Gross
Websitefrankawilczek.com

Frank Anthony Wilczek(/ˈvɪltʃɛk/[2]or/ˈwɪltʃɛk/;[3]born May 15, 1951) is an Americantheoretical physicist,mathematicianandNobel laureate.He is theHerman FeshbachProfessor of Physics at theMassachusetts Institute of Technology(MIT), Founding Director of T. D. Lee Institute and Chief Scientist at the Wilczek Quantum Center,Shanghai Jiao Tong University(SJTU), distinguished professor atArizona State University(ASU) and full professor atStockholm University.[4]

Wilczek, along withDavid GrossandH. David Politzer,was awarded theNobel Prize in Physicsin 2004 "for the discovery ofasymptotic freedomin the theory of thestrong interaction".[5]In May 2022, he was awarded theTempleton Prizefor his investigations into the fundamental laws of nature, that have transformed our understanding of the forces that govern our universe and revealed an inspiring vision of a world that embodies mathematical beauty.[6]

Early life and education[edit]

Born inMineola,New York,Wilczek is of Polish and Italian origin.[1]His grandparents were immigrants who "really did work with their hands", according to Wilczek, but his father took night school classes to educate himself, working as a repairman to support his family.[7]Wilczek's father became a "self-taught engineer", whose interests in technology and science inspired his son.[8]

Wilczek was educated in the public schools ofQueens,attendingMartin Van Buren High School.It was around this time Wilczek's parents realized that he was exceptional — in part as a result of Frank Wilczek having been administered anIQ test.[9]

After skipping two grades, Wilczek started high school in the 10th grade, when he was 13 years old. He was particularly inspired by two of his high school physics teachers, one of whom taught a course that helped students with the nationalWestinghouse Science Talent Search.Wilczek was a finalist in 1967 and ultimately won fourth place, based on a mathematical project involvinggroup theory.[10][11]

He received hisBachelor of ScienceinMathematicsand membership inPhi Beta Kappa[12]at theUniversity of Chicagoin 1970. During his last year as a math major at Chicago, he attended a course taught byPeter Freundongroup theoryin physics, which Wilczek later described as being "basicallyparticle physics",and very influential:[7]

Peter Freund played a big role in my life, though, because he taught this course on group theory, orsymmetry in physicsthat—he was so enthusiastic, and he really gushed—and it's beautiful material. Still to this day I think thequantumtheory of angular momentum is one of the absolute pinnacles of human achievement. Just beautiful.

Wilczek went to Princeton as a mathematics graduate student. After a year and a half, he transferred from mathematics to physics, withDavid Grossas his thesis advisor.[7]

He earned a Master of Arts in Mathematics in 1972 and aPh.D.in physics in 1974, both fromPrinceton University.[13]

Personal life[edit]

Wilczek metBetsy Devineat Princeton, when both watched the televised1972 Fisher-Spassky chess matches.[14]They married in 1973, and together they have two daughters.[1]His favorite physicist isJames Clerk Maxwell.[15]

Religious views[edit]

Wilczek was raisedCatholicbut later "lost faith in conventional religion"[1]although he toldScientific Americanthat religion "had meant a lot to me as a teenager".[16]He has been described as anagnostic[17]but tweeted in 2013 that "pantheist"is" closer to the mark ".[18]

Wilczek said that "the world embodies beautiful ideas" but "although this may inspire a spiritual interpretation, it does not require one".[19][20]

Science outreach and activism[edit]

Wilczek is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board for theFuture of Life Institute,an organization that works to mitigateexistential risksfacing humanity, particularlyexistential risk from advanced artificial intelligence.[21]

In 2014, Wilczek penned a letter, along withStephen Hawkingand two other scholars, warning that "Success in creatingAIwould be the biggest event in human history. Unfortunately, it might also be the last, unless we learn how to avoid the risks. "[22]

Wilczek is also a supporter of theCampaign for the Establishment of a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly,an organization which advocates for democratic reform in the United Nations, and the creation of a more accountable international political system.[23]

Wilczek is on the board forSociety for Science & the Public.He is a co-founding member of theKosciuszko Foundationof the Collegium of Eminent Scientists of Polish Origin and Ancestry.[24]

Wilczek has appeared on an episode ofPenn & Teller: Bullshit!,wherePennreferred to him as "the smartest person [they have] ever had on the show".

Honors[edit]

In 1982, he was awarded aMacArthur Fellowship.[25]

Wilczek was elected as a member of theNational Academy of Sciencesin 1990, a member of theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciencesin 1993,[26][27]and theAmerican Philosophical Societyin 2005.[28]

Wilczek became a foreign member of theRoyal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciencesin 2000.[29]He was awarded theLorentz Medalin 2002. Wilczek won theLilienfeld Prizeof theAmerican Physical Societyin 2003. In the same year, he was awarded the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics Commemorative Medal fromCharles Universityin Prague. He was the co-recipient of the 2003 High Energy and Particle Physics Prize of theEuropean Physical Society.The Nobel Prize in Physics 2004 was awarded jointly toDavid J. Gross,H. David Politzerand Frank Wilczek "for the discovery of asymptotic freedom in the theory of the strong interaction". Wilczek was also the co-recipient of the 2005King Faisal International Prize for Science.In that same year, he received the Golden Plate Award of theAmerican Academy of Achievement.[30]On January 25, 2013, Wilczek received anhonorary doctoratefrom the Faculty of Science and Technology atUppsala University,Sweden.[31]He also served on the Physical Sciences jury for the Infosys Prize from 2009 to 2011. In 2011, Wilczek gave theGeorge Gamow Memorial Lectureat theUniversity of Colorado Boulder.[32]In 2022 he was awarded theTempleton Prize[33]for the work that reveals "a vision of a universe that he regards as embodying mathematical beauty at the scales of the magnificently large and unimaginably small".[34]

Wilczek holds theHerman FeshbachProfessorship of Physics atMIT Center for Theoretical Physics.He has also worked at theInstitute for Advanced Studyin Princeton and theInstitute for Theoretical Physicsat theUniversity of California, Santa Barbaraand was also a visiting professor atNORDITA.

Research[edit]

Wilczek's 2004 Nobel Prize was for asymptotic freedom, but he has helped reveal and developaxions,anyons,asymptotic freedom,thecolor superconductingphases ofquark matter,and other aspects ofquantum field theory.He has worked oncondensed matter physics,astrophysics,andparticle physics.

Asymptotic freedom[edit]

In 1973, while a graduate student working withDavid GrossatPrinceton University,Wilczek (together with Gross) discoveredasymptotic freedom,which holds that the closerquarksare to each other, the less thestrong interaction(orcolor charge) between them; when quarks are in extreme proximity, the nuclear force between them is so weak that they behave almost as free particles. The theory, which was independently discovered byH. David Politzer,was important for the development ofquantum chromodynamics.According to theRoyal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Scienceswhen awarding Wilczek its Lorentz Medal in 2002,[35]

This [asymptotic freedom] is a phenomenon whereby the building blocks which make up the nucleus of an atom – 'quarks' – behave as free particles when they are close together, but become more strongly attracted to each other as the distance between them increases. This theory forms the key to the interpretation of almost all experimental studies involving modern particle accelerators.

Axions[edit]

Main article:Axion

The axion is a hypotheticalelementary particle.If axions exist and have low mass within a specific range, they are of interest as a possible component ofcold dark matter.

In 1977,Roberto PecceiandHelen Quinnpostulated a solution to the strong CP problem, thePeccei–Quinn mechanism.This is accomplished by adding a new global symmetry (called aPeccei–Quinn symmetry.) When that symmetry is spontaneously broken, a new particle results, as shown independently by Wilczek and bySteven Weinberg.[36][37]Wilczek named this new hypothetical particle the "axion" after a brand of laundry detergent,[38]while Weinberg called it "Higglet". Weinberg later agreed to adopt Wilczek's name for the particle.[39]

Although most experimental searches for dark matter candidates have targetedWIMPs,there have also been many attempts to detect axions.[40]In June, 2020, an international team of physicists working in Italy detected a signal that could be axions.[41][42]

Anyons[edit]

Main article:Anyon

Inphysics,an anyon is a type ofquasiparticlethat occurs only intwo-dimensionalsystems,with properties much less restricted thanfermionsandbosons.In particular, anyons can have properties intermediate between fermions and bosons, including fractional electric charge. This anything-goes behavior inspired Wilczek in 1982 to name them "anyons".[43]

In 1977, a group oftheoretical physicistsworking at theUniversity of Oslo,led byJon LeinaasandJan Myrheim,calculated that the traditional division between fermions and bosons would not apply to theoretical particles existing in twodimensions.[44]WhenDaniel TsuiandHorst Störmerdiscovered thefractional quantum Hall effectin 1982,Bertrand Halperin(1984) expanded the math Wilczek proposed in 1982 for fractional statistics in two dimensions to help explain it.[45]

Frank Wilczek, Dan Arovas, andRobert Schriefferanalyzed the fractional quantum Hall effect in 1984, proving that anyons were required to describe it.[46][47]

In 2020, experimenters from theEcole Normale Supérieureand from theCentre for Nanosciences and Nanotechnologies(C2N) reported inSciencethat they had made a direct detection of anyons.[46][48]

Time crystals[edit]

Main article:Time crystal

In 2012 he proposed the idea of atime crystal.[49]In 2018, several research teams reported the existence of time crystals.[50]In 2018, he and Qing-Dong Jiang calculated that the so-called "quantum atmosphere" of materials should theoretically be capable of being probed using existing technology such as diamond probes withnitrogen-vacancy centers.[51][52]

Current research[edit]

Publications[edit]

For lay readers[edit]

  • 2021Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality,Penguin PressISBN978-0735223790
  • 2015A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature’s Deep Design,Allen Lane,ISBN9781846147012
  • 2014 (withStephen Hawking,Max TegmarkandStuart Russell). "Transcending Complacency on Superintelligent Machines".Huffington Post.
  • 2008.The Lightness of Being: Mass, Ether, and the Unification of Forces.Basic Books.ISBN978-0-465-00321-1.
  • 2007.La musica del vuoto.Roma: Di Renzo Editore.
  • 2006.Fantastic Realities: 49 Mind Journeys And a Trip to Stockholm.World Scientific.ISBN978-981-256-655-3.
  • 2002, "On the world's numerical recipe (an ode to physics)",Daedalus131(1): 142–47.
  • 1989 (withBetsy Devine).Longing for the Harmonies: Themes and Variations from Modern Physics.W W Norton.ISBN978-0-393-30596-8.

Technical[edit]

Scholiahas a profile forFrank Wilczek(Q107450).
  • 1988.Geometric Phases in Physics.
  • 1990.Fractional Statistics and Anyon Superconductivity.[54]

See also[edit]

References[edit]

  1. ^abcd"Frank Wilczek – Autobiography".Nobel Prize.
  2. ^Wilczek, Frank.2004 Nobel Highlights with Laureates in Physics, David J. Gross, H. David Politzer, Frank Wilczek.Nobel Prize.Event occurs at 0:42 – via YouTube.
  3. ^Wilczek, Frank.A Beautiful Question.Talks at Google.Event occurs at 0:13 – via YouTube.
  4. ^"Frank Wilczek, Herman Feshbach Professor of Physics".Department of Physics, MIT. 2011.Retrieved2011-06-14.
  5. ^"Frank Wilczek Facts".NobelPrize.org.Stockholm: Nobel Foundation.Retrieved2020-05-06.
  6. ^Thomas, Burnett (May 11th, 2022)."Dr. Frank Wilczek Receives 2022 Templeton Prize",The Templeton Prize.Retrieved 11 May 2022.
  7. ^abcWilczek, Frank (September 15, 2020)."Oral history interview with Frank Wilczek, 2020 June 4".AIP.RetrievedSeptember 18,2020.Somewhere between working class and lower middle class. Yeah, lower middle class, I guess I would say. Unlike my grandparents, who really did work with their hands, my father, as I said, was kind of a technician and repairman. He actually got very good at the job and was rising through the ranks.
  8. ^"The Nobel laureate who got hooked on Stockholm".Stockholm University. September 15, 2020. Archived fromthe originalon October 16, 2017.RetrievedSeptember 18,2020.Frank Wilczek's story starts in Queens, New York, where he grew up in a working-class family with roots in Europe. They were children of the Great Depression from Long Island and had limited access to resources, but that didn't stop them from working to educate themselves. Frank's father was a self-taught engineer and passed his interest in technology and science on to his son.
  9. ^Dreifus, Claudia (December 28, 2009)."Discovering the Mathematical Laws of Nature".The New York Times.Retrieved22 May2012.
  10. ^"Noteworthy graduates: Frank Wilczek, Nobel laureate in physics".United Federation of Teachers. December 7, 2018. Archived fromthe originalon July 17, 2021.RetrievedSeptember 24,2020.As a high school senior, Wilczek was a finalist in the national Science Talent Search. He says his premise about mathematical structures called groups was the best part of his project, posing 'a sensible question for someone to ask at that stage'.
  11. ^"Westinghouse Science Talent Search 1967".Society for Science.RetrievedMay 11,2022.
  12. ^"FRANK WILCZEK CURRICULUM VITAE – PDF".docplayer.net.
  13. ^Frank Anthony Wilczekat theMathematics Genealogy Project
  14. ^Thompson, Elizabeth A (October 5, 2004)."Wilczek thanks family, country and Mother Nature".MIT News.RetrievedSeptember 21,2020.'I noticed that whatever moves Frank called out, the players would do what he said. They'd make the moves he predicted. This happened even when what he called out was different from what others called out', recalled Devine.
  15. ^Wilczek, Frank (2015).A Beautiful Question.
  16. ^Merali, Zeeya (May 11, 2022)."God, Dark Matter and Falling Cats: A Conversation with 2022 Templeton Prize Winner Frank Wilczek".Scientific American.RetrievedJune 12,2022.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.
  17. ^Wang, Amy X. (4 August 2015)."Why Is the World So Beautiful? A Physicist Tries to Answer".Slate Magazine.
  18. ^Wilczek, Frank [@FrankWilczek] (September 8, 2013)."My Wikipedia entry says" agnostic ", but" pantheist "is closer to the mark. Spinoza, Beethoven, Walt Whitman, Einstein – good company!"(Tweet) – viaTwitter.
  19. ^'A Beautiful Question', pp. 1–3, 322
  20. ^"A theoretical physicist searches for the design behind nature's beauty".Slate.Retrieved28 January2016.
  21. ^Who We Are,Future of Life Institute, 2014, archived fromthe originalon 2014-06-05,retrieved2014-05-07
  22. ^"Stephen Hawking: 'Transcendence looks at the implications of artificial intelligence – but are we taking AI seriously enough?'".The Independent (UK).1 May 2014.Retrieved28 January2016.
  23. ^"Overview".Campaign for a UN Parliamentary Assembly.Retrieved2017-10-27.
  24. ^"Kosciuszko Foundation - American Center of Polish culture - Eminent Scientists of Polish Origin and Ancestry".www.thekf.org.Archived fromthe originalon 2018-05-09.Retrieved2017-09-18.
  25. ^"Frank Wilczek – MacArthur Foundation".www.macfound.org.Retrieved2019-01-19.
  26. ^"Frank Wilczek".www.nasonline.org.Retrieved2020-05-11.
  27. ^"Frank Wilczek".American Academy of Arts & Sciences.Retrieved2020-05-11.
  28. ^"APS Member History".search.amphilsoc.org.Retrieved2021-05-27.
  29. ^"F.A. Wilczek".Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. Archived fromthe originalon 14 February 2016.Retrieved14 February2016.
  30. ^"Golden Plate Awardees of the American Academy of Achievement".www.achievement.org.American Academy of Achievement.
  31. ^"New honorary doctorates in science and technology – Uppsala University, Sweden".www.uu.se.Retrieved2016-02-03.
  32. ^Anas, Brittany (April 18, 2011)."Nobel Prize Winner Frank Wilczek to lecture at CU Boulder".Daily Camera.
  33. ^"Frank Wilczek".Templeton Prize.2022.RetrievedMay 11,2022.
  34. ^"Nobel physics laureate Frank Wilczek wins Templeton Prize for work on science, spirituality links".The Washington Times.Retrieved2022-05-12.
  35. ^"Frank Wilczek".Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.2002. Archived fromthe originalon November 28, 2020.RetrievedMay 11,2022.
  36. ^Wilczek, F. (1978). "Problem of StrongPandTInvariance in the Presence of Instantons ".Physical Review Letters.40(5): 279–282.Bibcode:1978PhRvL..40..279W.doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.40.279.
  37. ^Weinberg, Steven (1978). "A New Light Boson?".Physical Review Letters.40(4): 223–226.Bibcode:1978PhRvL..40..223W.doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.40.223.
  38. ^Overbye, Dennis (17 June 2020)."Seeking dark matter, they detected another mystery".The New York Times.
  39. ^Wilczek, Frank(7 January 2016)."Time's (almost) reversible arrow".Quanta Magazine.Retrieved17 June2020.
  40. ^"Homing in on Axions?" (Physics.aps.org, April 9, 2018)
  41. ^Letzter, Rafi (June 17, 2020)."Physicists Announce Potential Dark Matter Breakthrough".Scientific American.RetrievedSeptember 22,2020.A team of physicists has made what might be the first-ever detection of an axion. Axions are unconfirmed, hypothetical ultralight particles from beyond the Standard Model of particle physics, which describes the behavior of subatomic particles. Theoretical physicists first proposed the existence of axions in the 1970s in order to resolve problems in the math governing the strong force, which binds particles called quarks together. But axions have since become a popular explanation for dark matter, the mysterious substance that makes up 85% of the mass of the universe, yet emits no light.
  42. ^Falk, Dan (June 23, 2020)."Is Dark Matter Made of Axions?".Scientific American.RetrievedSeptember 22,2020.Then, in 1977 Helen Quinn and the late Roberto Peccei, both then at Stanford University, proposed a solution: perhaps there is a hitherto unknown field that pervades all of space and suppresses the neutron's asymmetries. Later, theoretical physicists Frank Wilczek and Steven Weinberg deduced that if the Standard Model were tweaked to allow such a field, it would imply the existence of a new particle, dubbed the axion. (Wilczek got the idea for the name from a brand of laundry detergent.)
  43. ^"Anyons, anyone?".Symmetry Magazine.August 31, 2011.RetrievedSeptember 24,2020.In 1982 physicist Frank Wilczek gave these interstitial particles the name anyon... 'Any anyon can be anything between a boson or a fermion', Keilmann says. 'Wilczek is a funny guy.'
  44. ^Wilczek, Frank (January 2006)."From electronics to anyonics".Physics World.19(1): 22–23.doi:10.1088/2058-7058/19/1/31.ISSN0953-8585.RetrievedSeptember 25,2020.In the early 1980s I named the hypothetical new particles 'anyons', the idea being that anything goes – but I did not lose much sleep anticipating their discovery. Very soon afterwards, however, Bert Halperin at Harvard University found the concept of anyons useful in understanding certain aspects of the fractional quantum Hall effect, which describes the modifications that take place in electronics at low temperatures in strong magnetic fields.
  45. ^Halperin, B. I. (1984)."Statistics of Quasiparticles and the Hierarchy of Fractional Quantized Hall States".Physical Review Letters.52(18): 1583–1586.Bibcode:1984PhRvL..52.1583H.doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.52.1583.The appearance of fractional statistics in the present context is strongly reminiscent of the fractional statistics introduced by Wilczek to describe charged particles tied to "magnetic flux tubes" in two dimensions.
  46. ^abNajjar, Dana (May 12, 2020)."'Milestone' Evidence for Anyons, a Third Kingdom of Particles ".Wired.RetrievedSeptember 18,2020.In the early 1980s, physicists first used these conditions to observe the 'fractional quantum Hall effect', in which electrons come together to create so-called quasiparticles that have a fraction of the charge of a single electron. (If it seems strange to call the collective behavior of electrons a particle, think of the proton, which is itself made up of three quarks.) In 1984, a seminal two-page paper by Wilczek, Daniel Arovas and John Robert Schrieffer showed that these quasiparticles had to be anyons.
  47. ^Dumé, Isabelle (May 28, 2020)."Anyons bunch together in a 2D conductor".Physics World.RetrievedSeptember 26,2020.The existence of anyons – which get their name from the fact that their behaviour is neither fermion-like or boson-like – was predicted in the early 1980s by the theoretical physicist Frank Wilczek. Soon afterwards, another physicist, Bert Halperin, found that anyons could explain certain aspects of the fractional quantum Hall effect, which describes the changes that take place in electronics at low temperatures in strong magnetic fields. Then, in 1984, Dan Arovas, Bob Schrieffer and Wilczek proved that a successful theory of the fractional quantum Hall effect does indeed require particles that are neither bosons or fermions.
  48. ^Bartolomei, H.; et al. (April 10, 2020)."Fractional statistics in anyon collisions".Science.368(6487): 173–177.arXiv:2006.13157.Bibcode:2020Sci...368..173B.doi:10.1126/science.aaz5601.PMID32273465.S2CID215551196.
  49. ^Wolchover, Natalie (2013-04-30)."Time Crystals' Could Upend Physicists' Theory of Time".Wired.
  50. ^Ball, Phillip (July 17, 2018)."In Search of Time Crystals".Physics World.RetrievedMarch 23,2019."We discovered experimentally that discrete time crystals not only exist, but that this phase is also remarkably robust." Mikhail Lukin, Harvard University
  51. ^Woo, Marcus (September 2018)."'Quantum Atmospheres' May Reveal Secrets of Matter ".Quanta Magazine.Retrieved11 May2020.
  52. ^Jiang, Qing-Dong; Wilczek, Frank (10 May 2019)."Quantum atmospherics for materials diagnosis".Physical Review B.99(20): 201104.arXiv:1809.01692.Bibcode:2019PhRvB..99t1104J.doi:10.1103/PhysRevB.99.201104.
  53. ^Wilczek, F.; Linder, E. V.; Good, M.R.R. (2020). "Moving mirror model for quasithermal radiation fields".Physical Review D.101(2): 025012.arXiv:1909.01129.Bibcode:2020PhRvD.101b5012G.doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.101.025012.hdl:1721.1/125524.S2CID213899274.
  54. ^Rokhsar, Daniel S. (1992). "Review ofFractional Statistics and Anyon Superconductivityby Frank Wilczek ".Physics Today.45(2): 101.Bibcode:1992PhT....45b.101W.doi:10.1063/1.2809542.

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