London Lecture 2006
FRANK WILCZEK
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Nobel Prize 2004
The Universe is a Strange Place
Over the course of the twentieth century we have
constructed a very successful fundamental theory of the behavior of
matter. Viewed from this perspective, the world looks very different from
our everyday reality. It is a very strange place, and a beautiful
one -- in particular, we've come to understand that the building blocks
of matter appear as notes in a Music
of the Void. I'll describe this using a combination of facts, pictures, and
jokes. Finally I'll discuss some recent discoveries indicating that the
world is even stranger than we've understood so far, and how we're rising
to the challenge.