The symmetry that shaped physics: Frank Wilczek on Einstein’s legacy

Einstein was a great hero of mine, and he's played an important role in my life

In many ways I tried to model my scientific expositions and style on the early Einstein

For several years I owned and lived in Einstein's house in Princeton

was kind of his, in that sense, his successor at the Institute for Advanced Study

He added profound themes to our understanding of nature. At a technical level, he really advanced, although he didn't articulate it explicitly

by example, he advanced the idea that symmetry, is what's very basic to the operation of fundamental law

In the special theory of relativity, he showed that by postulating symmetry

that is that the laws don't change, although they might have, if you move past a physical situation

at a constant velocity, the same laws still apply to that different looking situation

That kind of very conceptual idea of how physical law is constrained set a new style in physics that you assume that the world doesn change when it might have under various transformations That been really that that really has been a dominant theme of 20th century physics and of my own work

He carried it further in that, in the, in the general theory of relativity

where he postulated a new kind of symmetry called so-called local symmetry

which is vaster and leads to even more constraints on the possible description of the world

and even more particular guidance about what the equations should look like

And that kind of strategy has been spectacularly successful in a generalized sense

although we need some extra tricks, but in the generalized sense, that's the main trick that allowed us to figure out not only the correct theory of gravity

or actually a very, very good theory of gravity, which is Einstein's general theory of relativity

but also in the sub-nuclear domain where we had to guess fundamentally new laws

for fundamentally new interactions, which were very unfamiliar, the so-called strong and weak interactions

it turned out that this kind of hypothesis of grand symmetry was the right way to go

So in addition to being a beautiful idea, it's turned out to be an extremely fruitful idea

It led us to a description of interactions or new kinds of forces

where otherwise he would have been completely at sea