Summary of Franck Wilczek's's Fundamentals

By IRB Media

Get the Summary of Franck Wilczek's's Fundamentals in 20 minutes. Please note: This is a summary & not the original book. Original book introduction: 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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: Jun 5, 2021
• ISBN: 9781638155096

IRB Media

With IRB books, you can get the key takeaways and analysis of a book in 15 minutes. We read every chapter, identify the key takeaways and analyze them for your convenience.

Book preview

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

There is a common theme that runs through literature, philosophy, and theology that humans are insignificantly small when compared to the vastness of our universe. But when you look at humans, there are approximately 10 octillion atoms inside each of us. In essence, we are extremely vast as well.

#2

Global Positioning System (GPS) is able to obtain our location through a combination of tracking its own movement, receiving our phone’s signals, and cross-referencing this data with other global satellites (30 total), each using an atomic clock. All of these steps are based on certain assumptions, making GPS always imperfect.

#3

But because GPS has been so successful with obtaining our locations, we know the assumptions and geometry put into it are accurate. Thus, astronomers are able to make similar assumptions with measuring things in space to a fair level of certainty and accuracy.

#4

Astronomers, when measuring things extremely far from Earth, use how long a light beam would