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The Impulse of Beauty and Marie Curie — Maintained a Dialogue, and Respected Them

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The Impulse of Beauty and Marie Curie — Maintained a Dialogue, and Respected Them COMMENT BOOKS & ARTS and of US physics in general are well PHYSICS narrated. The newcomers made mistakes and missed opportunities, but European physicists — including such giants as Rutherford, James Chadwick and Pierre The impulse of beauty and Marie Curie — maintained a dialogue, and respected them. Lawrence and his Joseph Silk revels in Frank Wilczek’s treatise on how team stayed engaged, increasingly willing symmetry and harmony drive the progress of science. to admit to errors as their confidence grew, and generous with their know-how in help- ing to start other accelerator programmes as the fundamentals of geometry, music and the ‘Cyclotron Republic’ grew. chemistry. The music of the spheres, which Compelling characters abound. There Pythagoras described as the hum from AKG IMAGES AKG is the mysterious and influential Alfred celestial bodies whose periodicities echoed Loomis, a patron of science who achieves a harmony that he alone heard, inspired the feat of “being a public figure without let- him and his followers to develop harmonies ting the public in on it”. Later, there is Lewis between beauty, music, mathematics and sci- Strauss (pronounced ‘Straws’), Washing- ence. Numbers governed all, from octaves ton DC insider, chair of the Atomic Energy to right-angled triangles. Through perspec- Commission and die-hard opponent of a tive, geometry revolutionized classical, then nuclear-test-ban treaty. Lawrence seems to Renaissance, art; through the curvature of have easily formed bonds with exceptional space, it revolutionized understanding of people, but these sometimes shattered, as gravity. And Wilczek argues that colour, the with Manhattan Project leader J. Robert epicentre of beauty, unites art with biology, Oppenheimer, causing damage and dismay. chemistry and physics. Lawrence transformed strikingly from a The search for symmetry generated man who insisted that politics had no place enormous rewards in science, a gift that has in the lab to one who played high-stakes kept on giving. In the nineteenth century, political games around the credibility of Michael Faraday gave an elegant display of scientific advice on nuclear-weapon devel- empirical physics by mapping out the pat- opment — and fired outstanding scientists terns of magnetic lines of force. He went on because they refused to sign an oath of loy- Through the mythological figure of Urizen, to show that moving magnetic fields gener- alty. The Rad Lab drew talent, but much of William Blake probed the nature of reductionism. ate electric fields, motivating mathematical it leaked or was driven away as Berkeley physicist James Clerk Maxwell to develop became identified with the anti-communist an beautiful ideas drive science? In his equations for electromagnetism. These McCarthyism — under which people were A Beautiful Question, physicist and epitomized a fundamental symmetry, allow- branded un-American and unemployable Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek makes ing a magnetic field in motion to generate an — that abounded in the military–industrial Ca potent case that they can, hinging on quali- electric field, and vice versa. The fields prop- complex that it had helped to create. ties that have served as pathfinders to empir- agate through space, producing waves of The final chapter rushes through the for- ical truth in the physical world. The greatest light in all colours of the rainbow. Maxwell’s mation of CERN scientists, from Galileo to Albert Einstein, equations also predicted that electromag- “The Rad Lab in Geneva, Swit- saw in physics almost infinite beauty, includ- netic waves would propagate at frequen- drew talent, zerland, and the ing symmetry, harmony and truth. Today, cies beyond perception by the human eye. but much of it failure of its US we fervently hope for a genius with a beauty- Inspired, Heinrich Hertz discovered radio leaked or was competitor, the inspired Theory of Everything — or at least waves. Beauty had succeeded far beyond any driven away as Superconducting for the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in intent of Faraday’s. Berkeley became Super Collider, Geneva, Switzerland, to discover truth in Wielding the sword of beauty to refine identified with which was can- supersymmetry. scientific thought has a remarkable herit- McCarthyism.” celled in the A Beautiful Question is both a brilliant age. Einstein put beauty first in conceptual- 1990s. It is a com- exploration of largely uncharted territories izing the general theory of relativity. In the pliment to Hiltzik that, having initially wor- and a refreshingly idiosyncratic guide to dreary postwar climate of 1919, worldwide ried about the book’s size, I wanted more developments in particle physics. Vast and headlines greeted the — in particular, on how CERN consciously eclectic, it covers everything from atomism successful verification distanced itself from the military aspect of to the Higgs boson, musical harmony to of one of his key pre- the complex, and how the teamwork that anamorphic art, dark matter to the origins dictions — the bend- Lawrence developed applies, or fails to, in of the Universe. Wilczek lays out a vision of ing of light by gravity. collaborations of thousands rather than truth and beauty inspired by great modern Another triumph is dozens. Lawrence had left the scene by physicists and classical philosophers such the standard model then, but his influence still pervades aca- as Pythagoras and Plato. Lavish illustrations of particle physics, demia, industry and politics. ■ exemplifying beauty in art and science, from whose symmetries led William Blake’s Ancient of Days to fractal to prediction of the Jon Butterworth is professor of physics at images, are interwoven with quotations from Higgs boson. A Beautiful Question: Finding University College London and writes for luminaries in the arts and sciences, from Wilczek argues that Nature’s Deep The Guardian at go.nature.com/qhea9i. Molière to John Archibald Wheeler. the quantum core of Design He is the author of Smashing Physics. Wilczek begins with the beauty-inspired modern physics, the FRANK WILCZEK e-mail: [email protected] seeds sown by the ancient Greeks, including zoo of elementary Allen Lane: 2015. 156 | NATURE | VOL 523 | 9 JULY 2015 © 2015 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved BOOKS & ARTS COMMENT particles, stems from beautiful thoughts framed by appeals to symmetry. The Eightfold Way, named by physicist Murray Books in brief Gell-Mann after the Noble Eightfold Path of Buddhism, organizes elementary par- Planck: Driven by Vision, Broken by War ticles into octets; the Higgs, discovered Brandon R. Brown OXFoRD UNIVERSItY PRESS (2015) in 2012, is the final missing link in the The life of Max Planck, ‘father of quantum theory’, smacks of standard model. enigma: his personal papers were mostly destroyed in the Second Now the search is on for a unifying prin- World War. Physicist Brandon Brown has mined what survived for ciple to take us back to simplicity. Super- this illuminating biography. The main thread is the endgame of the symmetry, the most beautiful idea of all, Second World War, when the elderly Planck endured tribulations unites two fundamental types of particles, such as his son Erwin’s trial and execution for treason against fermions and bosons, distinguished by their the Reich. Through this Brown interweaves a gripping backstory, spins. It postulates massive ‘superpartners’ ranging from Planck’s landmark theoretical description of black- for each particle, the lightest of which is a body radiation to his loyal advocacy for fellow physicist Lise Meitner. stable candidate for dark matter. Some see a lack of elegance in a theory that has some 120 adjustable degrees of freedom. The sit- Discovering Tuberculosis: A Global History, 1900 to the Present uation is, however, being redeemed in part Christian W. McMillen YALE UNIVERSItY PRESS (2015) through the enormous efforts of experimen- Polio incidence is down by 99% since 1988, but tuberculosis (TB) tal particle physicists to measure many of remains a scourge; it kills 2 million people a year, most with HIV/AIDS. these numbers. Only one real issue remains: In his chronicle of TB’s trajectory from the start of the twentieth at what energies must one smash particles century, historian Christian McMillen probes our failure to control this together to seek supersymmetry’s elusive sig- “resilient, powerful, protean bacterial infection” and its drug-resistant nature? Wilczek optimistically predicts that strains. Tracing the swathe TB has cut through Africa, India and Native we will discover this holy grail of physics in American areas, McMillen identifies the catalogue of errors keeping five years. it in circulation — such as the closure of the UK Medical Research Occasionally the search for beauty has led Council’s TB units in 1986, just as Africa’s struggle with HIV began. us astray. Science was set back for centuries by the epicycles with which Greek astrono- mer Ptolemy described planetary motions. Secret Science: A Century of Poison Warfare and Human Experiments Modern data debunked Fred Hoyle’s Ulf Schmidt OXFoRD UNIVERSItY PRESs (2015) steady-state theory of the Universe. And This monumental history of twentieth-century military medical even particle physics, with its grand hopes ethics is a meticulous record of ambiguity. Historian Ulf Schmidt of unification, offers no insight into serious shows how Germany’s use of chemical weapons such as mustard cosmological problems such as why dark gas in the First World War spurred Britain, Canada and the United matter is more than five times as abundant States to begin secret toxic-agent trials that purported, in some as ordinary matter. Most recently there has cases, to be benign medical testing. At the UK Porton Down research been string theory, the compellingly beauti- centre alone, Schmidt reveals, 21,752 soldiers took part in tests ful union of mathematical simplicity with between 1939 and 1989 — an experience that was frequently quantum theory, particle physics and gravity. unpleasant, occasionally harmful and in a few cases fatal.
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