Talk:Frank Wilczek

Polish-American
I made an edit to the intro/header trying to conform to Manual of Style (biographies). I moved Mr. Wilczek's ethnic descent down to where it talks about his birth and education. This seems to flow pretty well. I have discussed this with one other editor but would appreciate any other comments or suggestions on how we can improve this article with the respect it deserves. Thanks!! --Tom 16:20, 22 May 2006 (UTC)


 * This change looks like an improvement to me too. betsythedevine 17:27, 22 May 2006 (UTC)

Copyvio
Unfortunately, in looking for the source of the first person statement, I discovered that the bulk of the article was copied verbatim from Dr. Wilczek's Nobel autobiography, simply with first person changed to third person. That's a big no-no!

However, perhaps since Dr. Wilczek's wife is one of the editors on this page (Hi Betsy!), she could ask her husband to release the same content under GFDL or to the public-domain. That certainly seems like the most elegant solution to the problem. LotLE × talk 15:46, 7 August 2006 (UTC)


 * Bit more: Looking through the history, it appears the copyvio material was added by Bunzil in this edit: . The version prior to that actually looks perfectly good, and perhaps even more encyclopedic (even with the change of grammatical person, the autobiography reads in a too personalistic tone... which is fine for autobiography, but not for us).  Maybe we should roll back to the version before that?  LotLE × talk  16:08, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

Dear LuLu, the intention was that the material was a starting point. It was going to be unrecognisable after heavy editing. Work in progress :-) Rollback is a bad idea because it might affect other edits unrelated to the problem. So I've removed the offending section and have pasted it below as a place holder until we hear from Betsy or until someone gets around to rewriting it. Best regards, bunix 01:21, 9 August 2006 (UTC)


 * Unfortunately, starting with something that is a copyright violation, and rewriting it repeatedly doesn't solve the problem. No matter how much it is derived at the wording level, it remains a derived work.  At a certain point it may be more be difficult to recognize the violation, but it still remains one.  Moreover, the edit history proves the case.  I doubt Wilczek (or the Nobel committee, or whoever holds the copyright) would actually sue Wikipedia... but the fact they could is the reason admins and bureaucrats (and me too) have become so careful about copyright issues.  Of course, if Betsy arranged release as GFDL, that's the best of all possible worlds... Betsy?  LotLE × talk  02:32, 9 August 2006 (UTC)


 * Hi, Lulu et al--Frank says he thinks the Nobel Committee may own the copyright on the bio he wrote for them. It was very sweet of Bunzil to try to reframe it in third person, but I'm not sure that the very personal first-personness of it stands up so well to that treatment. So I guess my suggestion would be to mine out any actual "notable" facts from it and keep the external link to the bio itself for those who want more...I'm mostly offline for a few days, and counting my pennies in wifi cafes when I'm online, so forgive the brevity and lateness of this reply! betsythedevine 18:38, 10 August 2006 (UTC)


 * I think that seems entirely right. The tone of Frank's autobio is... well, autobiographical.  We are better off just to read it for facts, then express those facts in our own encyclopedic words.  Have fun counting those pennies (but doesn't the Nobel award give you quite a few of them?)  LotLE × talk  21:14, 10 August 2006 (UTC)


 * Alas, once a Nobel prize has been shared with two other people, there are hardly any pennies left. Also in the US they tax the prize which is a bummer. bunix 12:43, 11 August 2006 (UTC)


 * Well... ISTM that >$1M * 1/3 * ~60% (after tax) is still a chunk of change. No, it's not Ken Lay money.  But it ain't a bad bonus... very well deserved, I am certain (or would be if I were able to have the slightest understanding of just what the winning work was :-)).  I'm gonna have to go win me one of those...  LotLE × talk  13:17, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

Hi LuLu, Well I make that $200,000 which doesn't even buy a house these days :-) I think it is a poor some of money for such a big acheivement. I'd like to win one too though, but more for the fun not the dough :-) Let's work on it! bunix 11:38, 17 August 2006 (UTC)

Removed Section that Needs Rewriting
Please can someone re-write these passages, unless we hear from Betsy:

He always loved all kinds of puzzles, games, and mysteries. Some of mhis earliest memories are about the questions he "worked on" even before he went to school. When he was learning about money, he spent a lot of time trying out various schemes of exchanging different kinds of money (e.g., pennies, nickels, and dimes) in complicated ways back and forth, hoping to discover a way to come out ahead. Another project was to find ways of getting very big numbers in a few steps. He discovered simple forms of repeated exponentiation and recursion for himself. Generating large numbers made him feel powerful as a child.

His parents were children during the time of the Great Depression, and their families struggled to get by. This experience shaped many of their attitudes, and especially their aspirations for him. They put very great stock in education, and in the security that technical skill could bring. When he did well in school they were very pleased, and he was encouraged to think about becoming a doctor or an engineer. As he was growing up his father, who worked in electronics, was taking night classes. Their little apartment was full of old radios and early-model televisions, and with the books his father was studying. It was the time of the Cold War. Space exploration was a new and exciting prospect, nuclear war a frightening one; both were ever-present in newspapers, TV, and movies. At school, he had regular air raid drills. All this made a big impression on him. He got the idea that there was secret knowledge that, when mastered, would allow Mind to control Matter in seemingly magical ways.

Another thing that shaped his thinking was religious training. He was brought up as a Roman Catholic. He loved the idea that there was a great drama and a grand plan behind existence. Later, under the influence of Bertrand Russell's writings and his increasing awareness of scientific knowledge, he lost faith in conventional religion.

He went to public schools in Queens, and was fortunate to have excellent teachers. Because the schools were big, they could support specialized and advanced classes. At Martin van Buren High School there was a group of thirty or so who went to many such classes together, and both supported and competed with one another. More than half went on to successful scientific or medical careers.

He arrived at the University of Chicago with large but amorphous ambitions. He flirted with brain science, but soon decided that the central questions were not ready for mathematical treatment, and that he lacked the patience for laboratory work. he read voraciously in many subjects, but he wound up majoring in mathematics, largely because doing that gave him the most freedom. During his last term at Chicago, he took a course about the use of symmetry and group theory in physics from Peter Freund. Freund was an extremely enthusiastic and inspiring teacher, and Wilczek felt an instinctive resonance with the material. He went to Princeton University as a graduate student in the math department, but kept a close eye on what was going on in physics. He became aware that deep ideas involving mathematical symmetry were turning up at the frontiers of physics; specifically, the gauge theory of electroweak interactions, and the scaling symmetry in Wilson's theory of phase transitions.

The great event of his early career was to help discover the basic theory of the strong force, QCD. The equations of QCD are based on gauge symmetry principles, and he make progress with them using (approximate) scaling symmetry.

An aspect of his later work has been to use insights and methods from "fundamental" physics to address "applied" questions, and vice versa. bunix 01:21, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

WikiProject class rating
This article was automatically assessed because at least one WikiProject had rated the article as start, and the rating on other projects was brought up to start class. BetacommandBot 14:29, 9 November 2007 (UTC)

Selected papers
I suggest the "selected papers" should be links to www.arXiv.org where possible, rather than to MIT's own PDF repository. arXiv gives access to other formats, "cited by" and "refers to" information, etc. I will implement this if no objection is raised. Dark Formal (talk) 04:35, 1 February 2008 (UTC)

My reverted edits
First of all, I don't understand why the summary should put David Politzer before David Gross in the list of 2004 co-winners of the 2004 Nobel Prize. Frank Wilczek worked with David Gross, not with David Politzer. Politzer before Gross is not alphabetical order, not the order used by the Nobel Committee. Why is it here?

And what is World Knowledge Dialogue Board doing in the article summary? I'm not sure anyone's many board memberships  are Wikipedia material at all unless activities on one or more of them are so significant as to create real news stories.

I also think that "They have two children" was an improvement over what it got reverted to, "and together have two children". But I don't want to get into any squabbles, especially with someone who seems to be making some hard-working changes for the better to other parts of the article, so I'm just making my case on this talk page. betsythedevine (talk) 10:30, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

Doctoral Students
Wasn't John March-Russell a Sidney Coleman student at Harvard? That's what HEPNAMES says. Frank visited Harvard for a year, but I don't think he could have officially been anyone's thesis advisor there. Dark Formal (talk) 21:21, 1 May 2008 (UTC)
 * John March-Russell's online CV lists both as advisors. When Frank was at Harvard, he had the opportunity to work closely with several incredibly bright young students, including John March-Russell, Mark Alford, and Martin Greiter, who later traveled to spend time expanding on those earlier conversations. But I don't really understand the arcana about saying which of the people you work with is your thesis advisor. I know that Sam Treiman did a lot of his grad research with Enrico Fermi although when he started grad work at Chicago his official advisor was John Simpson; his WP article lists both as his advisors. betsythedevine (talk) 08:49, 2 May 2008 (UTC)


 * I guess it depends what you mean by "thesis advisor", "doctoral student", etc. The unambiguous definition is the professor who is officially in charge of the student according to the university. In March-Russell's case that was Coleman. But I agree that Frank inspired and worked closely with March-Russell and others, even though he wasn't their official thesis advisor, so I don't want to take their names off the list. I added a "(*)" flag to the joint students, to clarify the relationship. I don't know who Greiter's official Harvard advisor was. Dark Formal (talk) 22:47, 27 May 2008 (UTC)


 * This sounds to me like an admirable solution. betsythedevine (talk) 23:32, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

With no disrespect to the World Knowledge Dialogue Scientific Board...
...I removed it from the bio summary. With no criticism intended of the motivation of whoever put it into the bio summary, there is no reason to give one honorary membership such apparent pre-eminence over his other past/present boards/visiting committees e.g. the Annals of Physics, the Perimeter Institute, CERN, etc. etc. In fact, Frank asked me if somebody could fix this apparent anomaly, and so I did.

I also changed the order of his co-recipients of the Nobel Prize in 2004 -- my own idea, not Frank's. Alphabetical order, and the Nobel citation, put Gross ahead of Politzer. Furthermore, Frank's work was in collaboration with David Gross, not with David Politzer. So it makes more sense for this bio to say that Wilczek got a prize with Gross and Politzer; it is hard to imagine a reason other than somebody-put-it here why the bio should say, as it currently does, he got it with Politzer and Gross. betsythedevine (talk) 05:23, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

=Punkin Chunkin= Someone should include a mention of how Frank is an avid participant in the sport of Punkin Chunkin. http://store.discoveryeducation.com/product/show/63812 --Saukkomies talk 00:11, 6 December 2012 (UTC)
 * I did find a working URL about Wilczek at the 2008 contest https://press.discovery.com/us/sci/press-releases/2008/pumpkins-get-aerodynamic-makeover-punkin-chunkin/ HouseOfChange (talk) 02:38, 22 September 2020 (UTC)

=Frank Wilczek's HELL - one of his jokes again or a fact?= the main article never mentioned Frank Wilczeks HELL (updated SUSY - or the "SUSY goes to HELL" proposal): Supersymmetry or Susy is not only a great idea, but a fundamental truth of multi-nature. The current "Susy" is a mechanism to bend the mono-universal laws (of our Universe). The current "sypersymmetry model" is a sham of false mirage of a monoverse (a single Universe - not the whole Multi-verse). There is nothing wrong with "Susy" but with brains that don't understand her! "Susy" is a "Helix", an evolving symmetry, not closed to itself (herself if you are in love). The correct name of "Susy" is "Helix-symmetry", and it's not a closed-simple symmetry, but a probabilistic-infinite symmetry. "Susy" is way more prodigious than anyone had thought! We even got her name wrong, it's called "Helix-symmetry" or "evolving helix symmetry". By distorting, making smaller, making a closed loop non probabilistic theory, or misnaming "Susy" one can never understand her full mechanisms. I said "Susy", because people don't care about her, but only lust her functionality, not her essence. She is also an it. If one tries to rape the miltiversal laws, he/she will only diverge from their awareness. Welcome to HELL! Helically Evolving Laterigrade Laws. — Preceding unsigned comment added by mk3 (talk) 04:01, 16 October 2015 (UTC)

"Hilbert curve" of the "noise grid"
The problem with the "old Wilczekian field" is that it's designed in many books as a digital chessboard, built by stable "n"-dimensional equal squares, or mono-dimesinal equal squares due to the "holographic principle" (the same result, but the "holographic principle" is were data are kept, the n-dimensional projection is simply a projection).

All the above are correct except the fact that "chromodynamic noise" is a form of "noise", thus the "noise grains" are "not continuous" and "not of stable characteristics if relativistically examined (we can probe only in a relativistic manner though)" but their (noise grains) characteristics are both "brobabilistic"(inside a wavefunctional permissible range) and "relativistic"(the other interacting grain particles cause the "dynamic range" of these grains to vary)

"Noise grains" are the product of random fluctuation of the "grid" ("noise grains" are the "grid"). We can apply "number theory"(pure mathematics) because each "grain" alone is an "integer digit". If relativistically examined via "combinatorics" as a part of a "noise set" each grain "contibutes" to the overall "grid". Even though each "grain" is an "integer digit" when we probe that set via collisions, we will distort it's original properties.

The "Nyquist frequency" or "Planck frequency"(same thing) of the "grid"("chromodynamic noise grains"), is half of the sampling rate of a "discrete signal" processing system. The "grid" is not a digitally quantized system, thus the "discrete signal" of the "grid"(void field or noise field) is both "probabilistic" and "relativistic" in a manner I proclaimed above.

All particles are "shifting statistics" or "wavefunctions" or "waves". Particles don't cause the "noise grid" to "shift", only the "statistics of the grid" do "shift". "Wavefunction" means "Shifting statistics of the chromodynamic noise grid".

A "Hilbert curve" (also known as a Hilbert space-filling curve) is a "continuous" fractal space-filling curve. "Ideal particles" or "long-lasting particles" tend to look like "Hilbert curves", an organized "noise pattern of the grid that statistically makes apparent a particle".

"Particle" = "Hilbert curve" of the "noise grid". In nature though, no particle is perfect, thus we need to evolve a "non-continuous" fractal space-filling fragmented curve(s) diffusion.

We have to "combine" existing fields of "mathematics" in order we "meliorate" our approach.

Frank Wilczek — Preceding unsigned comment added by Juliana (talk) 00:58, 22 October 2015 (UTC)

= Core Theory =

Just curious why there is no discussion of his Core Theory? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Greg.collver (talk • contribs) 15:59, 22 April 2017 (UTC)
 * I found a couple of references for this, most notably Science News and Edge.org, also Sean Carroll made a Tshirt for it. The "Core theory" seems to be Wilczek's attempt to improve the way people talk about physics, by putting together the forces described by the "Standard Model" with gravitational forces. It's his way of separating stuff that is very well known and accepted from stuff more uncertain or unknown. Any physicists reading, feel free to correct me. I also think it would be up to physics experts not me to decide if this should be in the article. HouseOfChange (talk) 19:00, 3 August 2018 (UTC)

= Agnostic or atheist or ... pantheist? =

Somebody recently changed this article from saying Wilczek is an "agnostic" to saying he is an "atheist." I see no RS given for that change. Wilczek himself (I googled for Wilczek agnostic) said on Twitter (Sept 2013): "My Wikipedia entry says “agnostic”, but “pantheist” is closer to the mark. Spinoza, Beethoven, Walt Whitman, Einstein – good company!" https://twitter.com/frankwilczek/status/376705595228696576 Googling Wilczek atheist turns up the following: "Frank Wilczek also tips his cap to the old Greek philosopher when he argues that the world was created to embody beautiful ideas, and if there is a Creator, he's an artist above all...Wilczek was raised Catholic and identifies as an agnostic" https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnfarrell/2015/08/31/god-as-ultimate-artist-frank-wilczeks-beautiful-question/#2e9c7bdd63ea The bio's change from agnostic to atheist seems unsupported, so I am reverting it. HouseOfChange (talk) 20:08, 21 November 2017 (UTC)
 * Slate also called Wilczek an agnostic in 2015. The tweet is 2013 and the forbes article is 2015, so Wilczeks might have changed his mind; alternatively, the forbes site and slate might well be subtly wrong. Rolf H Nelson (talk) 03:21, 23 November 2017 (UTC)
 * We have 2 WP:RS (Forbes plus Slate) saying that Wilczek is an agnostic, plus his own tweet saying he is more of a pantheist. We have 0 RS of Wilczek saying he is an atheist or changed his religious beliefs after 2015. Thanks for removing the category "atheist" from the article. HouseOfChange (talk) 13:33, 23 November 2017 (UTC)

= Time crystals =

A new SPA has made started making edits, first here and then at time crystals, representing a 2015 paper by Oshikawa and Watanabeaka as "scientific consensus as of 2019." The same editor removed the citation of a 2018 article in Physics World written by Philip Ball (which discusses the 2015 paper at some length) as "The prior edits cite popular science articles that do not reflect academic consensus." (This article from Nature (2017) also considers the 2015 paper at length without concluding that it discredited time crystals.) We rely on secondary sources, especially RS such as Physics World and Nature, to tell us what is the "scientific consensus," not on primary sources interpreted for us by an anonymous IPs. As per WP:BRD, I undid the series of edits and invited discussion here on the talk page. HouseOfChange (talk) 23:46, 24 March 2019 (UTC)

= Expanding and improving the article =

In order to expand the article, as has been suggested, we need more examples of "significant coverage," scientific or personal. KC Cole's 1984 article in Esquire has some personal info e.g. musical and literary interests But a wider range of sources would be good. Searching for "wilczek + queens" turns up a few, e.g.  and  HouseOfChange (talk) 07:49, 21 November 2019 (UTC)
 * Update in 2020: Paul Dirac has a good structure; borrowing some to improve this article: "Personal life" with subcategories Early years, Education, Family, Religious views, Honors. Another good early life source is a recent interview by AIP. HouseOfChange (talk) 14:53, 21 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Now using the Paul Dirac structure for the science part. IMO, if there is a section named "McGuffin", it should answer 2 questions. 1) What is a McGuffin? 2) What is the connection of this article to McGuffin? HouseOfChange (talk) 02:51, 23 September 2020 (UTC)

Wilczek-Zee Phase
There is a phenomenon in physics called Wilczek-Zee Phase (linked to the Berry phase). Maybe we should mention that here somewhere. 2A01:599:703:7EB9:B9C9:45A2:620B:3556 (talk) 12:45, 12 February 2024 (UTC)