In his new book, 'Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality,' published today by Penguin Press, Wilczek writes that the lessons were a revelation: 'To experience the deep harmony between two different universes - the universe of beautiful ideas and the universe of physical behavior - was for me a kind of spiritual awakening. He had decided to sit in on a class by physics professor Peter Freund, who, with a zeal 'bordering on rapture,' led students through mathematical theories of symmetry and ways in which these theories can predict behaviors in the physical world. It was during this turbulent time that Wilczek found unexpected comfort, and a new understanding of the world, in mathematics. At the University of Chicago, where Frank Wilczek was an undergraduate, regularly scheduled classes were 'improvised and semivoluntary' amid the turmoil, as he recalls. Brilliant, lucid, and accessible, this celebration of human ingenuity and imagination will expand your world and your mind.In the spring of 1970, colleges across the country erupted with student protests in response to the Vietnam War and the National Guard's shooting of student demonstrators at Kent State University. He excavates the history of fundamental science, exploring what we know and how we know it, while journeying to the horizons of the scientific world to give us a glimpse of what we may soon discover. Synthesizing basic questions, facts, and dazzling speculations, Wilczek investigates the ideas that form our understanding of the universe: time, space, matter, energy, complexity, and complementarity. Through these pages, we come to see our reality in a new way-bigger, fuller, and stranger than it looked before. With clarity and an infectious sense of joy, he guides us through the essential concepts that form our understanding of what the world is and how it works.

In Fundamentals, Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek offers the reader a simple yet profound exploration of reality based on the deep revelations of modern science. One of our great contemporary scientists reveals the ten profound insights that illuminate what everyone should know about the physical world Wilczek writes with breathtaking economy and clarity, and his pleasure in his subject is palpable.' - The New York Times Book Review

' Fundamentals might be the perfect book for the winter of this plague year.

Fundamentals by frank wilczek