My brother gave me a book by physicist Frank Wilczek, A Beautiful Question, which looks at the fundamental question of whether nature is essentially a “work of art.” Wilczek looks at how we can develop a “fully unified description of nature at the deepest level” by understanding that particles like quarks and gluons are rooted in “heightened… symmetry that would surely make Plato smile.” He talks about how cutting edge theories of science still look at some of the same questions of geometry, symmetry, and beauty that the ancient philosophers like Plato, mathematicians like Pythagoras, and then physicists like Einstein were pondering in their work. This article about the book sums it up by saying that while Pythagoras “had no inkling of the symmetries of nature that physicists have divined during the past century, … he was broadly correct about the role they now play.” I am realizing that larger theories of mathematics and physics have a lot to do with the simulations that I am studying.
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