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Article Excerpt
The Lightness of Being: Mass, Ether, and the Unification of Forces, by Frank Wilczek. Basic Books, New York, 2008. 270 pp., $26.95. IBN: 987-0465003211
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
FRANK WILCZEK WON THE NOBEL prize in physics in 2004 (the Gross-Politzer-Wilczek award for "asymptotic freedom") and is a professor at M.I.T. The key to his new book is in the subtitle: Mass, Ether, and the Unification of Forces. Mass is no longer a basic building block. Instead, we recast Albert Einstein's E = [mc.sup.2] into m = E/[c.sup.2] (called Einstein's second law). Mass is generated through suitably energetic processes. Since c, the speed of light, is a large number (300 million meters/second), [c.sup.2] = 9 x [10.sup.16]. So a huge amount of energy E yields only a small amount of mass. Not to worry, however, as Wilczek is only colliding electron, positron, and proton projectiles in giant atom-smashers such as the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva. The relatively slow-speed survivors weigh more than the...
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