LONGING FOR THE HARMONIES

Reviewed 11/25/2000

Longing for the Harmonies by Frank Wilczek and Betsy Devine

LONGING FOR THE HARMONIES:
Themes and Variations from Modern Physics
Frank Wilczek
Betsy Devine
New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1988

Rating:

4.5

High

ISBN 0-393-02482-2 361pp. HC/GSI $19.95

The authors' intent in writing this book is twofold: to introduce the concepts of science to a wider audience, and to convey the beauty of those concepts in a novel way. To that end, theoretical physicist Frank Wilczek1 and his wife Betsy Devine2 present a description of the findings of modern physics which is organized using the structures of classical music: as ten themes with variations, each introduced by a prelude, and containing intermezzi between, as diversions.

This approach works very well as long as the ground being covered is well-trodden; however remote from ordinary experience the ideas of special and general relativity or of quantum mechanics may be, they have been scrutinized, systematized, and tested by a whole generation of theoretical and experimental physicists (some whose names are almost household words: Einstein, Bohr, Fermi, Minkowski, Weinberg) and thus lend themselves to orderly presentation. But the cutting edges of research — Grand Unification Theories (GUTs), Supersymmetry, and Cosmology — tremble in a ferment which defies any such ordering.

Frank Wilczek is also actively involved in breaking some of this new ground, and his perspective is therefore not as balanced as an outsider's might be.

The book is nevertheless well worth reading. First, it imparts a novel and very palatable exposition of quantum mechanics, enriched by surveys of historical background reminiscent of (but less tortuous than) the sort of thing James Burke does. Second, the discussions of GUTs and Supersymmetry, while harder to understand, provide knowledge omitted from most popular treatments of the subject. Not least of these is Wilczek's tale of his early research in "How Asymptotic Freedom Found Me" (pages 207-217). And for epigram enthusiasts, the book is a delight, for it leads off numerous chapters with quotations from both scientific and literary works. Quotations also enrich the text in many places; these are taken from popular culture sources such as Star Trek and the science fiction of Olaf Stapeldon, as well as the writings of Einstein and other scientists.

In the latter section of the book, where the unsettled territory lies, there is one wild and hairy idea for which I fault Wilczek, for he provides no evidence. This is found on pages 283 and 284, in Prelude Nine: Genesis Machines; the relevant paragraphs are:

Now, imagine life developing in an environment of supercooled vapor. Suppose that intelligent life forms eventually appear, begin to study physics, and come to understand about supercooling. They then realize that the existence of their society — in fact, of the world as they know it — is extremely precarious. In the long run, they cannot prevent the ultimate ecological catastrophe. Eventually, a sufficiently large droplet will appear and grow to engulf their world.

A related sort of ecological catastrophe has happened before, on a universal scale, in the course of cosmic evolution. The role of the water molecules is played by certain unfamiliar particles called Higgs particles, but the physics is otherwise very similar. The Higgs particles, in some circumstances, will condense only around sufficiently large droplets. When they do, the properties of everything change, because everything interacts with the ambient Higgs particles. Elementary particles that used to be massless become massive, or vice versa. The boundary of the condensing drop expands, essentially at the speed of light, and marks the division between two worlds in which the basic constituents of matter have very different properties.

As we said, this sort of natural genesis machine has acted before, probably several times. Can it happen again? Are we, like the poor supercooled vapor creatures, faced with inexorable doom? Our current knowledge of the laws of physics is insufficient to tell us for sure.

If the ultimate ecological catastrophe does occur, we'll receive no warning. No message can outstrip the condensation front, which moves at the speed of light. And, of course, once the condensation front arrives, the properties of the material in our bodies is {sic} so drastically altered that consciousness is inevitably destroyed. We'll never know what hit us. In a peculiar way, then, there's nothing to worry about.

– Pages 283-4

In that last sentiment, Wilczek speaks only for himself. As for the effect he describes, I believe the prior occurrences he mentions were during the Big Bang itself. If he means they happened later than that, he gives no evidence for such events — and he is otherwise scrupulous about supporting evidence. Indeed, this whole prelude smacks of wild speculation, including a digression on the evolution of intelligence. Later, on page 296, there is this apologia, probably from Betsy Devine: "Dear reader, you must have noticed that in the last few chapters conjecture has been piled atop conjecture, creating a mighty tower of speculation with few solid elements of support. Have we strayed from the narrow path of scientific investigation into the tempting pastures of pure mythmaking and wishful thinking? Perhaps. But we did this with open eyes."

Aside from this, there are several passages in the latter part of the book that I found hard to understand or possibly contradictory. But it's hard to say whether this is a fault of the narrative, or of my own scanty knowledge of the topics. As for outright goofs, I found only one: on page 112, the frequencies of visible light are given in scientific notation as numbers with negative exponents. Obviously the exponents should be positive. But this is an easy mistake to miss, since the wavelengths, given immediately before, are properly expressed with negative exponents.

1 Wilczek did graduate work at Princeton University. When this book was published, he was Chancellor's Professor of Physics at UC Santa Barbara. He is the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and a permanent member of the Institute for Theoretical Physics.
2 Betsy Devine works as a freelance writer. She also holds a Master of Science degree in engineering from Princeton.

There are only a few typos. You will have noted the one in the quoted passage above, a number disagreement between subject and object: "properties . . . is". The others are found in

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