American Scientist

FUNDAMENTALS: Ten Keys to Reality. Frank Wilczek. xviii + 254 pp. Penguin Press, 2021. $26.

The constellation of practices and perspectives we call science is rightly considered a triumph of human culture. The scientific mix of empirical investigation and theoretical inquiry that began some 400 years ago, which has roots dating back to the Hellenistic Greeks, has left virtually no aspect of culture untouched. The motivations behind the Scientific Revolution were manifold. Many individuals were drawn to science because they wanted to better the human condition, and some were drawn to it as a means of gaining money or even military advantage. But in its deepest expression, science has been seen as a means of understanding the nature of the world—of knowing the true face of reality. It is in this spirit that Nobel Prize–winning physicist Frank Wilczek has written his newest book, Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality. It is a deeply thoughtful and philosophical work that is all the more interesting for the potent questions it raises.

Wilczek is a theoretical physicist who works in high energy physics, which is the study of fundamental particles such as quarks and the interactions between them. High energy physics seeks to articulate questions that would have been familiar to the philosophers of ancient Greece: What is the world made of? What is the nature of space? Of time? Of change?

Early in the 20th century, physicists began uncovering the modern version of answers to these ancient questions by probing ever smaller scales and finding that matter can be decomposed into particles of various types. Bulk material was found to be made of atoms, which themselves were composed of electrons along with protons and neutrons in the atomic nucleus. Later the protons and neutrons were themselves seen to be built from even more fundamental particles called quarks. Eventually, an entire subatomic “zoo” was discovered, and the interactions of these manifold particles have been mapped out in what is now known as the Standard Model of particle physics. Wilczek won his Nobel Prize for contributions to the Standard Model, which now stands as one of science’s most extraordinary achievements. Built over the past 70 years, the Standard Model offers a stunning map of the nature of matter at a fundamental level—although that fundamental level may not be the final fundamental level (more on that later).

It is this achievement, along with other advances in physics, that led Wilczek to title his book Fundamentals. His aim in the book is to lay out for the reader the contours of a perspective on the fundamental nature of the world, the bedrock on which reality is supposedly built. It is a perspective that has been constructed by physicists. For Wilczek, there are 10 keys to it. He unpacks these in 10 chapters that address the ways in which the diverse appearances we experience can be reduced to a deeper set of underlying principles.

Wilczek’s fundamentals are the ideas that form the backbone of modern physics. They include space and time, combined as Einstein’s relativistic space-time, the mathematical representation of which constitutes the stage on which the drama of physics plays out; fields, such as gravity and electromagnetism, which extend throughout space and time and exert forces; physical laws—mathematically expressible relations that determine the behavior of the fields across space and time; and dynamic complexity, which arises when chemical bonds are made and broken. After describing these “basic ingredients of physical reality,” Wilczek discusses cosmic history, the emergence of complexity, perception, things we still don’t understand about how the world works, and complementarity—“the concept that one single thing, when considered from different perspectives, can seem to have very different or even contradictory properties.”

As Wilczek takes the reader on a masterful tour of what physicists have learned about the world, he provides engaging and concise descriptions of topics ranging from the nuclear reactions that power stars to the essential role of spin in particle physics (which is interesting, because these particles, as he explains, are not really spinning). Anyone curious about how science describes the physical world will gain from Wilczek’s overview a more concrete understanding of that description. But there is much more to Fundamentals than just a tour of physics. I found the book to be inspiring and thought-provoking.

Wilczek provides engaging and concise descriptions of topics ranging from the nuclear reactions that power stars to the essential role of spin in particle physics.

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Nevertheless, I think that Wilczek is pointing in the wrong direction when it comes to answering the question of what, truly, is real. One reason he has chosen the title Fundamentals is to contrast his approach with religious fundamentalism. He gives a concise view of his perspective and philosophy when he says in the preface, “In studying how the world works, we are studying how God works, and thereby learning what God is.” This is the same view Einstein took when he wrote, “I believe in Spinoza’s God, who reveals himself in the lawful harmony of the world.” Wilczek’s fundamentals can, therefore, be seen as a project in ontology. The fundamentals he describes are the bedrock upon which all reality is built.

Unlike some of his colleagues, Wilczek does not scorn philosophy or make naive statements about the philosophical implications of physical theories when he takes this perspective. He cares deeply about what physics means for how we view the world, and he is sensitive to the ways in which that view can enrich our lives. But his description of those meanings leaves out what I regard as the most important aspect of nature and our lives: experience.

Consider Wilczek’s description of time. A lovely chapter titled “There’s Plenty of Time” contains the following passage: “What time is it? That is what time is. Time is what clocks measure, and everything that changes is a clock.” This perspective substitutes what physicists can do with time (measure it using a clock) for the essential nature of time in terms of the profound weirdness of what lived experience is for us. In 1922, when the philosopher Henri Bergson was seeking to articulate the experiential nature of time, which he referred to as duration, he got into a debate with Einstein about it. Measurements of time for Bergson do not corral the experience of time as duration, nor do they exhaust it. Duration, he asserted, as an expression of experience as time, does not reduce to mere psychology or the psychophysics of the nervous system. Einstein’s famous retort to Bergson, “The time of the philosophers does not exist,” was seen to win the day in the 1920s. But in recent years, many have come to see Einstein as having missed Bergson’s point that lived time—experience as time—is more than the mathematics of clock measurement. Even Einstein himself later in life acknowledged this dichotomy.

By contrast, the reality that Wilczek posits is a disembodied one. It is a perspectiveless perspective, a “view from nowhere,” as philosopher Thomas Nagel has put it. Most importantly, it is a view that no one has ever had, and it is therefore not quite the Reality-with-a-capital-R Wilczek believes it to be.

Instead, in my view, it is experience in the phenomenological sense that must be taken as fundamental. That is where we all begin and end. That is also the place from which all scientific accounts arise. Experience is what lies at the core of philosopher Edmund Husserl’s warning against the “surreptitious substitution” of abstractions in mathematical physics for the innate and irreducible fact of the lifeworld (lebenswelt). The lifeworld is just a different name for experience, one that focuses on the inherent holism of that experienced world. It is only out of this holism that we can, sometimes, foreground specific structures that then become a subject for scientific inquiry. This kind of surreptitious substitution is also what the great mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead was referring to when he spoke of avoiding the “bifurcation of nature.” We must not, according to Whitehead, split nature into primary qualities that are associated with mathematical physics and secondary qualities that are “mere” perceptions. Even the physicist Stephen Hawking asked, “What is it that breathes fire into the equations?”—a question that points to the absence of the verb “to be” in the equations for the Standard Model.

If experience is taken as fundamental, then rather than seeking to embed experience in physics, we should be trying to embed physics in experience. Instead of thinking that experience can be reduced to accounts of biological machines acting via stimulus-response dynamics, we should be asking how embodied subjects, inseparable from their lifeworlds, can create abstractions like physical theory from the concreteness of experience. We should be asking, What is it about the inescapable and irreducible nature of experience—a presence that does not cleanly separate into inner and outer worlds—that allows the abstractions of mathematical physics to be so profoundly useful? Considering these questions is important, lest we reduce the infinitely rich and variegated lifeworld of experience into mere epiphenomena—brain states that themselves reduce to chemical states, which then reduce to atomic states and so on, until only the phantom, lifeless platonic world of pure abstraction remains.

Wilczek says that our lived experience misleads us when it comes to understanding the way matter and energy work on microscopic and macroscopic scales. But we are not really misled. Our collective activities in the lifeworld have led to the creation of technology and science, which have opened up the possibility of new experiences. But those experiences of looking through microscopes or at particle tracks in a cloud chamber don’t point to a disembodied reality.

Wilczek affirms that a Theory of Everything in physics, should such a thing ever be found, would not exhaust the mysteries at the heart of our being.

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Without careful consideration, the idea that mathematical physics is what’s really real turns the bright self-luminosity of experience (to use a term from classical Buddhist philosophy) into nothing but a story of biological sensors and neurological processors, a story in which we become nothing but meat computers duly responding to genetic programming—a story that inevitably leads to the bottomless pit of mind-body dualism. The wish to avoid such a story is the reason that Whitehead was determined to address the power of abstractions without creating hierarchies of objective and subjective.

Early in the book Wilczek quotes Frank Ramsey, a brilliant thinker who contributed to mathematics, economics, and philosophy in the 1920s:

My picture of the world is drawn in perspective and not like a model to scale. The foreground is occupied by human beings and the stars are all as small as three-penny bits. I don’t really believe in astronomy, except as a complicated description of part of the course of human and possibly animal sensation.

Wilczek admires Ramsey but believes that he missed an opportunity to be inspired by the grandness of the universe. I think, however, that Wilczek may have missed Ramsey’s point, which is that, in a very real sense, we are the source of the universe, not the other way around. Experience—and its stubborn, outrageous, mysterious, ongoing presence—is the fundamental ground from which our astronomical narrative originates. Human experience is a whole from which the presence of others—humans, animals and the abiotic—cannot be separated. There is a world without us, of course; it is simply not this one. It is not the lifeworld in all its unmediated specificity. The world without us is not our world, where the abstractions of physics can arise from the complicated, communal processes of science and can be seen in all their glorious power.

I do not raise these points to criticize Wilczek’s purposes or inclinations. I find his writing to be unusually sensitive to this beautiful and yet also sorrowful world. He affirms that a Theory of Everything in physics, should such a thing ever be found, would not exhaust the mysteries at the heart of our being. In the final chapter, he expresses these considerations with great humility and respect for other views. He notes that quantum mechanics raises profound questions about measurement and interaction, and also discusses the possibilities that there may be multiple “levels of description” for phenomena such that a Theory of Everything may never be possible. He also sees that engagement with science serves higher human purposes such as compassion. In an afterword, he writes that “the tasks of liberation and empathy are not separated from understanding the fundamentals of science. Indeed, understanding helps us achieve them.”

These are words that express both knowledge and wisdom. Even though I disagree with some of the philosophical perspective the book is grounded upon, I am no less thankful for having had the opportunity to cover that ground with its author.