A Nobel laureate in physics says one of the keys to success is avoiding hard work.

“I try to avoid hard work. When things seem difficult, it’s often a sign that there’s a better way to do it [un anumit lucru]”, said the American theoretical physicist and mathematician Frank Wilchek.

His comment was mentioned on Twitter on Sunday by the Nobel Committee in a message about how to start the year “2022”, a joke or a typo by the administrators of the page, the social network officially taken over by Elon Musk at the end of October does not have the function of editing posts.

However, it should be emphasized that Wilczek has in mind the best way to solve the problem and that he obviously does not rule out efforts to solve complex problems.

“If you’re not making mistakes, you’re not working hard enough on the big problems. And this is a mistake,” he said another time.

Who is Frank Wilczek, winner of the Nobel Prize in 2004

Wilczek won the Nobel Prize in Physics 19 years ago, along with Americans David Gross and David Politzer, for researching how the quark particles around everything we see are built and how they work.

The Nobel committee attributed 3 discoveries of asymptotic freedom in the theory of the strong interaction, also known as the strong nuclear force – one of the 4 fundamental natural interactions known today, along with the electromagnetic interaction, the weak interaction (weak nuclear force), and gravity.

Wilczek and Gross, his PhD supervisor, in 1972 discovered the basic theory behind the strong nuclear force that led to the completion of the Standard Model of particle physics. At the time of publication of the work, Vilchek was only 21 years old.

“Through their discoveries, these three brought physics closer to the great dream of formulating a single theory that would also include gravity, a universal theory,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences emphasized in 2004, but the formulation of a single theory of physics remains a chimera for scientists even after nearly 20 years

Wilczek also gave the name “axion” to a hypothetical particle believed to be one of the components of dark matter, an unknown type of matter that scientists believe makes up a significant portion of the total mass of the universe.

In addition to his research, Vilcek is the author of several books that popularize science for the general public, one of which, Fundamentele lumii fisica, has also been translated into Romanian.