Fundamentals

Fundamentals

Ten Keys to Reality

Summary

One of our great contemporary scientists reveals the ten profound insights that illuminate what everyone should know about the physical world

In Fundamentals, Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek offers the reader a simple yet profound exploration of reality based on the deep revelations of modern science. With clarity and an infectious sense of joy, he guides us through the essential concepts that form our understanding of what the world is and how it works. Through these pages, we come to see our reality in a new way--bigger, fuller, and stranger than it looked before.

Synthesizing basic questions, facts, and dazzling speculations, Wilczek investigates the ideas that form our understanding of the universe: time, space, matter, energy, complexity, and complementarity. He excavates the history of fundamental science, exploring what we know and how we know it, while journeying to the horizons of the scientific world to give us a glimpse of what we may soon discover. Brilliant, lucid, and accessible, this celebration of human ingenuity and imagination will expand your world and your mind.

Reviews

  • A gorgeous and inviting overview of the fundamental facts of physical reality.
    Steven Pinker, Johnson Professor of Psychology, Harvard University, and author of Enlightenment Now

About the author

Frank Wilczek

Frank Wilczek was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2004. He is the prize-winning author of numerous books, including A Beautiful Question and Longing for the Harmonies. Wilczek is the Herman Feshbach Professor of Physics at MIT; founding director of the T. D. Lee Institute and chief scientist of the Wilczek Quantum Center in Shanghai; and a distinguished professor at Arizona State and Stockholm universities.
Learn More

Sign up to the Penguin Newsletter

For the latest books, recommendations, author interviews and more