The Nobel Physicist Frank Wilczek, author of A Beautiful Question, thinks CERN may soon go a long way beyond the discovery of the Higgs-Boson particle and prove supersymmetry. In a Spiegel Q&A conducted by Johann Grolle, the scientist also explains what the consistency of natural laws says to him:

Spiegel:

Are you astonished that nature obeys laws that we humans are able to understand?

Frank Wilczek:

This fact has deep meaning, and is not at all guaranteed. As a thought experiment, let us assume that the whole world is just a simulation on a gigantic supercomputer, where we are also just part of this simulation. So, roughly speaking, we are talking about a world in which Super Mario thinks that his Super Mario world is real. The laws in such a world wouldn’t necessarily be beautiful or symmetric. They would be whatever the programmer put in there, which means these laws could be arbitrary, they could suddenly change or be different from place to place. And there would be no simpler description of these laws than a very long computer program. Such a world is logically possible, but our world is different. It is a glorious fact that in our world, when we go really deep, we can understand it.•