Wilczek, along with David Gross and H. David Politzer, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2004 "for the discovery of asymptotic freedom in the theory of the strong interaction".[5] In May 2022, he was awarded the Templeton Prize for his "investigations into the fundamental laws of nature, that has transformed our understanding of the forces that govern our universe and revealed an inspiring vision of a world that embodies mathematical beauty."[6]
Early life and education
Born in Mineola, New York, Wilczek is of Polish and Italian origin.[1] His grandparents were immigrants who "really did work with their hands", according to Wilczek, but his father took night school classes to educate himself, working as a repairman to support his family.[7] Wilczek's father became a "self-taught engineer", whose interests in technology and science inspired his son.[8]
Wilczek was educated in the public schools of Queens, attending Martin Van Buren High School. It was around this time Wilczek's parents realized that he was exceptional, in part as a result of their son having been administered an IQ test.[9]
After skipping two grades, Wilczek started high school in the 10th grade, when he was 13 years old. He was particularly inspired by two of his high school physics teachers, one of whom taught a course that helped students with the national Westinghouse Science Talent Search. Wilczek was a finalist in 1967 and ultimately won fourth place, based on a mathematical project involving group theory.[10][11]
Peter Freund played a big role in my life, though, because he taught this course on group theory, or symmetry in physics that—he was so enthusiastic, and he really gushed—and it's beautiful material. Still to this day I think the quantum theory of angular momentum is one of the absolute pinnacles of human achievement. Just beautiful.
Wilczek went to Princeton as a mathematics graduate student. After a year and a half, he transferred from mathematics to physics, with David Gross as his thesis advisor.[7]
He earned a Master of Arts in Mathematics in 1972 and a Ph.D. in physics in 1974, both from Princeton University.[13]
Wilczek was raised Catholic but later "lost faith in conventional religion"[1] although he told Scientific American that religion "had meant a lot to me as a teenager".[16] He has been described as an agnostic[17] but tweeted in 2013 that "'pantheist' is closer to the mark".[18]
Wilczek said that "the world embodies beautiful ideas" but "although this may inspire a spiritual interpretation, it does not require one".[19][20]
In 2014, Wilczek penned a letter, along with Stephen Hawking and two other scholars, warning that "Success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history. Unfortunately, it might also be the last, unless we learn how to avoid the risks."[22]
This [asymptotic freedom] is a phenomenon whereby the building blocks which make up the nucleus of an atom – 'quarks' – behave as free particles when they are close together, but become more strongly attracted to each other as the distance between them increases. This theory forms the key to the interpretation of almost all experimental studies involving modern particle accelerators.
The axion is a hypothetical elementary particle. If axions exist and have low mass within a specific range, they are of interest as a possible component of cold dark matter.
In 1977, Roberto Peccei and Helen Quinn postulated a solution to the strong CP problem, the Peccei–Quinn mechanism. This is accomplished by adding a new global symmetry (called a Peccei–Quinn symmetry.) When that symmetry is spontaneously broken, a new particle results, as shown independently by Wilczek and by Steven Weinberg.[36][37] Wilczek named this new hypothetical particle the "axion" after a brand of laundry detergent,[38] while Weinberg called it "Higglet". Weinberg later agreed to adopt Wilczek's name for the particle.[39]
Although most experimental searches for dark matter candidates have targeted WIMPs, there have also been many attempts to detect axions.[40] In June, 2020, an international team of physicists working in Italy detected a signal that could be axions.[41][42]
In physics, an anyon is a type of quasiparticle that occurs only in two-dimensionalsystems, with properties much less restricted than fermions and bosons. In particular, anyons can have properties intermediate between fermions and bosons, including fractional electric charge. This anything-goes behavior inspired Wilczek in 1982 to name them "anyons".[43]
Frank Wilczek, Dan Arovas, and Robert Schrieffer analyzed the fractional quantum Hall effect in 1984, proving that anyons were required to describe it.[46][47]
In 2012 he proposed the idea of a time crystal.[49] In 2018, several research teams reported the existence of time crystals.[50] In 2018, he and Qing-Dong Jiang calculated that the so-called "quantum atmosphere" of materials should theoretically be capable of being probed using existing technology such as diamond probes with nitrogen-vacancy centers.[51][52]
Current research
"Pure" particle physics: connections between theoretical ideas and observable phenomena;
^ abcWilczek, Frank (September 15, 2020). "Oral history interview with Frank Wilczek, 2020 June 4". AIP. Retrieved September 18, 2020. Somewhere between working class and lower middle class. Yeah, lower middle class, I guess I would say. Unlike my grandparents, who really did work with their hands, my father, as I said, was kind of a technician and repairman. He actually got very good at the job and was rising through the ranks.
^"The Nobel laureate who got hooked on Stockholm". Stockholm University. September 15, 2020. Archived from the original on October 16, 2017. Retrieved September 18, 2020. Frank Wilczek's story starts in Queens, New York, where he grew up in a working-class family with roots in Europe. They were children of the Great Depression from Long Island and had limited access to resources, but that didn't stop them from working to educate themselves. Frank's father was a self-taught engineer and passed his interest in technology and science on to his son.
^"Noteworthy graduates: Frank Wilczek, Nobel laureate in physics". United Federation of Teachers. December 7, 2018. Archived from the original on July 17, 2021. Retrieved September 24, 2020. As a high school senior, Wilczek was a finalist in the national Science Talent Search. He says his premise about mathematical structures called groups was the best part of his project, posing 'a sensible question for someone to ask at that stage'.
^Thompson, Elizabeth A (October 5, 2004). "Wilczek thanks family, country and Mother Nature". MIT News. Retrieved September 21, 2020. 'I noticed that whatever moves Frank called out, the players would do what he said. They'd make the moves he predicted. This happened even when what he called out was different from what others called out', recalled Devine.
^Merali, Zeeya (May 11, 2022). "God, Dark Matter and Falling Cats: A Conversation with 2022 Templeton Prize Winner Frank Wilczek". Scientific American. Retrieved June 12, 2022. The use of the word "God" in common culture is very loose. People can mean entirely different things by it. For me, the unifying thread is thinking big: thinking about how the world works, what it is, how it came to be and what all that means for what we should do. I chose to study this partly to fill the void that was left when I realized I could no longer accept the dogmas of the Catholic Church that had meant a lot to me as a teenager.
^Letzter, Rafi (June 17, 2020). "Physicists Announce Potential Dark Matter Breakthrough". Scientific American. Retrieved September 22, 2020. A team of physicists has made what might be the first-ever detection of an axion. Axions are unconfirmed, hypothetical ultralight particles from beyond the Standard Model of particle physics, which describes the behavior of subatomic particles. Theoretical physicists first proposed the existence of axions in the 1970s in order to resolve problems in the math governing the strong force, which binds particles called quarks together. But axions have since become a popular explanation for dark matter, the mysterious substance that makes up 85% of the mass of the universe, yet emits no light.
^Falk, Dan (June 23, 2020). "Is Dark Matter Made of Axions?". Scientific American. Retrieved September 22, 2020. Then, in 1977 Helen Quinn and the late Roberto Peccei, both then at Stanford University, proposed a solution: perhaps there is a hitherto unknown field that pervades all of space and suppresses the neutron's asymmetries. Later, theoretical physicists Frank Wilczek and Steven Weinberg deduced that if the Standard Model were tweaked to allow such a field, it would imply the existence of a new particle, dubbed the axion. (Wilczek got the idea for the name from a brand of laundry detergent.)
^"Anyons, anyone?". Symmetry Magazine. August 31, 2011. Retrieved September 24, 2020. In 1982 physicist Frank Wilczek gave these interstitial particles the name anyon ... 'Any anyon can be anything between a boson or a fermion', Keilmann says. 'Wilczek is a funny guy.'
^Wilczek, Frank (January 2006). "From electronics to anyonics". Physics World. 19 (1): 22–23. doi:10.1088/2058-7058/19/1/31. ISSN0953-8585. Retrieved September 25, 2020. In the early 1980s I named the hypothetical new particles 'anyons', the idea being that anything goes – but I did not lose much sleep anticipating their discovery. Very soon afterwards, however, Bert Halperin at Harvard University found the concept of anyons useful in understanding certain aspects of the fractional quantum Hall effect, which describes the modifications that take place in electronics at low temperatures in strong magnetic fields.
^ abNajjar, Dana (May 12, 2020). "'Milestone' Evidence for Anyons, a Third Kingdom of Particles". Wired. Retrieved September 18, 2020. In the early 1980s, physicists first used these conditions to observe the 'fractional quantum Hall effect', in which electrons come together to create so-called quasiparticles that have a fraction of the charge of a single electron. (If it seems strange to call the collective behavior of electrons a particle, think of the proton, which is itself made up of three quarks.) In 1984, a seminal two-page paper by Wilczek, Daniel Arovas and John Robert Schrieffer showed that these quasiparticles had to be anyons.
^Dumé, Isabelle (May 28, 2020). "Anyons bunch together in a 2D conductor". Physics World. Retrieved September 26, 2020. The existence of anyons – which get their name from the fact that their behaviour is neither fermion-like or boson-like – was predicted in the early 1980s by the theoretical physicist Frank Wilczek. Soon afterwards, another physicist, Bert Halperin, found that anyons could explain certain aspects of the fractional quantum Hall effect, which describes the changes that take place in electronics at low temperatures in strong magnetic fields. Then, in 1984, Dan Arovas, Bob Schrieffer and Wilczek proved that a successful theory of the fractional quantum Hall effect does indeed require particles that are neither bosons or fermions.
^Ball, Phillip (July 17, 2018). "In Search of Time Crystals". Physics World. Retrieved March 23, 2019. "We discovered experimentally that discrete time crystals not only exist, but that this phase is also remarkably robust." Mikhail Lukin, Harvard University
