A Beautiful Question

Books | Project Ninety | Training

19 February 2022 - Zürich

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Frank Wilczek falls into the all too common difficulty of physicists trying to describe their field to the layman in a non-mathematical way. In A Beautiful Question he tries to take us from A to J without bothering to go through BCDEFGH or I. For me, knowing the math, I'm excited because I know those steps in between. And it's a familiar story that Frank is retelling. In that sense the book is enjoyable, although I can't imagine reading it as a layman. The particular Penguin paperback printing which I got also included a number of illustrations on nice paper obviously for pictures in the middle of the book, but which were not printed in color. This made them much less elucidating than the author had intended. One is even a side-by-side picture that is attempting to show us the difference between our vision with colors and a dog's vision without colors. Of course both pictures are black and white so they look identical.