Top 40 Frank Wilczek Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “If you don’t make mistakes, you’re not working on hard enough problems. And that’s a big mistake.”

— Frank Wilczek

2. “Why is there something rather than nothing?”

— Frank Wilczek

3. “I’m convinced that art and science activate the same parts of the brain.”

— Frank Wilczek

4. “The brain rewards us for interacting with beautiful things. In this way, evolution wants to encourage us to do what is good for us.”

— Frank Wilczek

5. “In physics, you don’t have to go around making trouble for yourself – nature does it for you.”

— Frank Wilczek

6. “The answer to the ancient question Why is there something rather than nothing would be that nothingis unstable.”

— Frank Wilczek

7. “Matter is not what it appears to be. Its most obvious property-variously called resistance to motion, inertia, or mass- can be understood more deeply in completely different terms. The mass of ordinary matter is the embodied energy of more basic building blocks, themselves lacking mass. Nor is space what it appears to be. What appears to our eyes as empty space is revealed to our minds as a complex medium full of spontaneous activity.”

— Frank Wilczek

8. “The universe is a strange place, and we’re all in it together.”

— Frank Wilczek

9. “Graphene has unique mechanical and electrical properties, which promise many applications. Inspired by graphene’s promise, people have figured out some considerably more efficient ways to make it! One optimistic, but maybe not crazy, study forecasts that a 100 billion market in graphene will develop over the next few years.”

— Frank Wilczek

10. “So graphene makes an extremely strong, tough material. At the same time, because it is only one atomic layer thick, a graphene sheet is light and flexible. In explaining their 2010 award, the Nobel committee mentioned that a one-square meter graphene hammocck could support a cat, while weighing about as much as one of the cat’s whiskers.”

— Frank Wilczek

11. “Subtle is the Lord, but malicious She is not.”

— Frank Wilczek

12. “Ordinary matter is a secondary manifestation of the Grid, tracing its level of excitation.”

— Frank Wilczek

13. “An ordinary mistake is one that leads to a dead end, while a profound mistake is one that leads to progress. Anyone can make an ordinary mistake, but it takes a genius to make a profound mistake.”

— Frank Wilczek

14. “In short: the space of color information is infinite-dimensional, but we perceive, as color, only a three-dimensional surface, onto which those infinite dimensions project.”

— Frank Wilczek

15. “Many of my heroes, like Galileo, Maxwell, Newton and, less explicitly, Einstein thought what they were doing was finding out what God is. All of them had this inspiration that if you want to find out what God is, you have to look at his work.”

— Frank Wilczek

16. “But we can expect the language history of the world to be revealing in another way. A language community is not just a group marked out by its use of a particular language: it is an evolving communion in its own right, whose particular view of the world is informed by a common language tradition. A language brings with it a mass of perceptions, cliches, judgments and inspirations. In some sense, then, when one language replaces another, a people’s view of the world must also be changing.”

— Frank Wilczek

17. “Quantum fields fill all all space, and the quantum electric and magnetic fields obey Maxwell’s equations. Nevertheless, when you observe the quantum fields, you find their energy packaged in discrete units: photons.”

— Frank Wilczek

18. “In physics, your solution should convince a reasonable person. In math, you have to convince a person who’s trying to make trouble. Ultimately, in physics, you’re hoping to convince Nature. And I’ve found Nature to be pretty reasonable.”

— Frank Wilczek

19. “In the more advanced, modern parts of physics we learn that light itself is a form of matter, and indeed that matter in general, when understood deeply, is remarkably light-like. So again, our interest in and experience with light, which is deeply rooted in our essential nature, proves fortunate.”

— Frank Wilczek

20. “I went off to college planning to major in math or philosophy – of course, both those ideas are really the same idea.”

— Frank Wilczek

21. “If not through divine supervision, how do the atoms of modern chemistry, with their exactly reproducible, stable properties, emerge from equations that, fundamentally, are equations for change?”

— Frank Wilczek

22. “When religion talks about our aspirations and our sense of morality, I do not believe that science can contradict it. However, when religion contradicts science on matters of fact, religion must yield.”

— Frank Wilczek

23. “Gravitons are the avatars of general covariance.”

— Frank Wilczek

24. “The world offers many possibilities for different sensory universes, which support very different interpretations of the world’s significance. In this way our so-called Universe is already very much a multiverse.”

— Frank Wilczek

25. “Knowing how to calculate something is not the same as understanding it. Having a computer to calculate the origin of mass for us may be convincing, but is not satisfying. Fortunately we can understand it too.”

— Frank Wilczek

26. “Total energy, which is the conserved quantity, is the sum of several terms: kinetic energy, mass energy, potential energy, and field energy. Those different terms refer to aspects of reality that seem, on the face of it, quite different. Much of the power of the concept of energy, in applications, comes precisely from its ability to describe, and relate, several different aspects of reality.”

— Frank Wilczek

27. “The legendary Danish physicist Niels Bohr distinguished two kinds of truths. An ordinary truth is a statement whose opposite is a falsehood. A profound truth is a statement whose opposite is also a profound truth.”

— Frank Wilczek

28. “Supersymmetry, if correct, will be a profound new embodiment of beauty in the world. Because the transformations of supersymmetry turn substance particles into force particles, and vice versa, supersymmetry can explain, based on symmetry, why neither of those things can exist without the other: Both are the same thing, seen from different perspectives. Supersymmetry reconciles apparent opposites, in the spirit of yin-yang.”

— Frank Wilczek

29. “Yet it is beautiful to discover that there’s another chapter to the story, where we discover deep unity beneath, and supporting, the diversity of appearance. All colors are one thing, seen in different states of motion. That is science’s brilliantly poetic answer to Keats’s complaint that science “unweaves a rainbow.”

— Frank Wilczek

30. “I believe that everything you’ve said is not even wrong.”

— Frank Wilczek

31. “The best way to address the big ultimate questions is likely to be through dialogue with Nature. We must pose pointed sub-questions that give Nature a chance to respond with meaningful answers, in particular with answers that might surprise us.”

— Frank Wilczek

32. “For us, the great conclusion is this: all the colors can be obtained from any one of them, by motion, or, as we say, by making Galilean transformations. Because Galilean transformations are symmetries of the laws of Nature, any color is fully equivalent to any other. They all emerge as different views of the same thing, seen from different but equally valid perspectives.”

— Frank Wilczek

33. “If an energetic and powerful Creator made the world, it could be that what moved Him – or Her, or Them, or It – to create was precisely an impulse to make something beautiful.”

— Frank Wilczek

34. “The human mind is our ultimate sense organ. Mind has discovered that there are invisible infinities hidden in light. Our perception of color projects the doubly infinite-dimensional space of physical color onto the three-dimensional wall of our inner Cave.”

— Frank Wilczek

35. “Thus the electromagnetic information entering our eyes at each image point is infinite-dimensional twice over, because for each spectral color there are two possible polarizations, each of which can occur with an independent strength. Human vision overlooks that doubling because human eyes cannot distinguish between different polarizations of light.”

— Frank Wilczek

36. “Ordinary space is a three dimensional continuum, and so is the space of perceived colors.”

— Frank Wilczek

37. “It is the more diverse, irregular, superficially haphazard bodies-like the human-that require more detailed assembly instructions. Symmetry emerges as the default structure when information and resources are limited.”

— Frank Wilczek

38. “If we know an object has symmetry, we can deduce some of its properties. If we know a set of objects has symmetry, we can infer from our knowledge of one object the existence and properties of others. And if we know that the laws of the world have symmetry, we can infer from one object the existence, properties, and behavior of new objects.”

— Frank Wilczek

39. “The entity we perceive as empty space is a multilayered, multicolored superconductor. What an amazing, astonishing, beautiful, breathtaking concept. Extraordinary, too.”

— Frank Wilczek

40. “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler. – Albert Einstein.”

— Frank Wilczek

41. “The graviton is the particle from which gravitational fields are made. Photons bind together atoms and molecules; gluons bind together quarks, protons, and atomic nuclei; gravitons bind planets, stars, galaxies, and big things in general.”

— Frank Wilczek

42. “Science tells us many important things about how things are, but it does not pronounce how things should be, nor forbid us from imagining things that are not. Science contains beautiful ideas, but it does not exhaust beauty. It offers a uniquely fruitful way to understand the physical world, but it is not a complete guide to life.”

— Frank Wilczek

43. “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead – his eyes are closed. – Albert Einstein.”

— Frank Wilczek

44. “Each of our human bodies contains far more atoms than there are stars in the visible universe, and our brains contain about as many as neurons as there are stars in our galaxy. The universe within is a worthy compliment to the universe beyond.”

— Frank Wilczek

45. “Science tells us many important things about how things are, but it does not pronounce how things should be, nor forbid us from imagining things that are not.”

— Frank Wilczek

46. “That undermining process can go much further, beyond merely discrediting absurdities. Scientific understanding bears such abundant and delightful fruit that eating from its Tree of Knowledge can spoil one’s taste for other foods.”

— Frank Wilczek