Volume 56, Number 6 · April 9, 2009
Leaping into the Grand Unknown
By Freeman Dyson
The Lightness of Being: Mass, Ether, and the Unification of Forces
by Frank Wilczek
Basic Books, 270 pp., $26.95
Frank Wilczek is one of the most brilliant practitioners of particle physics. Particle physics is the science that tries to understand the smallest building blocks of earth and sky, just as biol-ogy tries to understand living creatures. Particle physics is running about two hundred years behind biology. In the eighteenth century, Carl Linnaeus started systematic biology by giving Latin names to species of plants and animals, Homo sapiens for humans and Pan troglodytes for chimpanzees. In the nineteenth century, Darwin created a unified theory for biology by explaining the origin of species. In the twentieth century, Ernest Rutherford laid the ground for particle physics by discovering that every atom has a nucleus that is vastly smaller than the atom itself, and that the nucleus is made of particles that are smaller still. In the twenty-first century, particle physicists are hoping for a new Darwin who will explain the origin of particles.
Review, 4169 words
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