A review by niecierpek
Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality by Frank Wilczek

informative reflective

3.25

Disclaimer:)
I am not an expert- far from it, so please read this review as a collection of loose ramblings by a complete non-expert who loves to read research on the topic.
This text is rather uneven.  Some of it contains extreme fundamentals and oversimplifications, and some of it is newer and more interesting, especially the second part.   There are things that I really like about the text, and things I found as inexcusable omissions. 

 I like how Wilczek encompasses us, humans, as an integral part of the universe.  We are not separate from the universe, just the opposite, by ‘observing the world, we participate in making it’ (Chapter 10).  We also contain multitudes of cells more abundant than the stars in galaxies, and by sheer number of thoughts and physiological processes that go on in us during a lifetime we rival the universe in complexity.  This wonder is one of the better messages of the book. 

A very clear presentation on of the elementary particles is another feature of the book that I found very well done.  But this one is not without reservations. Oversimplification is most probably to blame here. At the very beginning, Wilczek says he is not going to present hypothetical knowledge as truth in the book, and yet, he does just that.  He presents both graviton and axion (elementary particles of respectively gravity and dark matter) as if they were reality and fact, without any qualifications.  Moreover, he uses the royal ‘we’ to present them, as if all physicists agreed on them.  It’s even more inexcusable from a specialist on elementary particles with a Nobel prize bagged for the work on them.  He should have qualified the statements on them.  It should have said that by all accounts they are still hypothetical!  Nowhere in the text does he say that this is his view of reality, and not the only one around.  

Another inexcusable, in my opinion, omission is presenting ‘locality’ as the only fundamental feature of the universe.  Nowhere in the text is it said that experiments on the elementary particles suggest that ‘non- locality’ is ALSO its fundamental feature with which we have to contend.  It’s interesting because the 2022 Nobel prize in physics was given just for that - proving that non-locality exists. I understand that Wilczek is presenting the standard model here,  it he should at least mention that there are others that people are working on.  

So, as Wilczek says in the footnotes, ‘‘But if relativity , quantum mechanics , or locality is wrong , we've got a lot of unlearning to do , because those principles work well and explain a lot.’ 

And so we do, but you wouldn’t know it by just reading his book.