Readers of this column may recall my trouble with physics: Newton, Einstein, Hawking, et al. I needed physics for the mathematically challenged. Eureka? (Archimedes, an ancient physicist.) Well, perhaps.

Frank Wilczek’s Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality (Penguin, 2021) is reader-friendly. Example, anecdote, and philosophy don’t exactly coat the pill of mathematical physics, but they keep you going through the difficult parts.

My 50 year old picture of physics, high school version, involved molecules, atoms, and three subatomic particles: protons, neutrons, electrons. Now we have photons, quarks, gravitons, gluons, dark matter, strong forces… I don’t really understand what all these are, or how they interact. But Wilczek is comforting. He quotes Richard Feynman: “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.”

What I did get is a sense of the immense and the infinitesimal, in time and space. 13.8 billion years ago the big bang produced an ever-expanding universe; inconceivable amounts of matter and energy moving outward in all directions. But all this is made up of particles, some so small they can only be “detected”, not “seen”, some so momentary that they last for an unimaginably small fraction of a second.

Wilczek is very good on how scientists study all this. They note the behaviour of masses and energy, theorize the materials and causes, and set up experiments to look for them. Sometimes they find them; sometimes they need another theory. The scale of their activity is awesome, from space telescopes and probes, to the Large Hadron Collider, a seventeen mile tunnel, a racetrack for protons. One of the attached instruments, the ATLAS detector, “is more than twice as large as the Parthenon”. It looks for Higgs particles whose lifetime “is about…a tenth of a trillionth of a billionth of a second.”

Fundamentals also looks at practical applications. There’s a wonderfully clear explanation of Global Positioning Systems and their use of atomic clocks. We’re reminded of transistors, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, etc. Computers are both an outcome and a tool of physics.

At this point Wiczek offers a bold speculation: super computers and Artificial Intelligence may go beyond what humans can conceive; genetically modified humans may catch up. Perhaps not a comforting idea. But interesting.

David R. Jones is, he hopes, still learning.