Nobel Prize-winning Physicist @FrankWilczek on a Beautiful Universe

Nobel Prize-winning physicist Frank Wilczek joins us at The School of Life to demonstrate how our ideas about beauty and art are deeply intertwined with our scientific understanding of the cosmos.

Wilczek illustrates how the discovery of celestial forces, such as gravity and the earth’s orbit, gave birth to new dynamism in visual art; that the aesthetic satisfaction we get from understanding the symmetry of mathematics and matter is the same as the satisfaction we get from understanding art.

Using examples from from Pythagoras and Plato, Galileo and Newton, Maxwell and Einstein, he will demonstrate how this quest has guided the work of all scientific pursuit in the western world and shows that beauty is both quantifiable and subjective.