An interesting interview by Johann Grolle at Spiegel...

An interesting interview by Johann Grolle at Spiegel Online:

Nobel Physicist Frank Wilczek: ‘The World is a Piece of Art’

The world is a piece of art, produced according to a very peculiar style. What I find particularly striking is the outstanding role of symmetry. […] The principle of symmetry as we use it in physics and mathematics can be described as “change without change.” While this may sound mystical or bizarre, it actually means something quite simple. What, for instance, makes a circle such a symmetrical object? It’s that you can rotate it around its center and it will remain a circle. In the case of an equilateral triangle, small rotations will change it, but if you rotate it by 120 degrees it comes back to itself. It thus has some symmetry, though less than a circle. This concept of symmetry as “change without change” can easily be generalized to laws of physics, or to the equations that express them.

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Image caption:  A representation of traces of a proton-proto collision in the search for the Higgs particle.