Gross, David

David is a Nobel Laureate in Physics (2004). A particle physicist and string theorist, he is the director of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. With Frank Wilczek and David Politzer, he discovered asymptotic freedom, which holds that the closer quarks are to each other, the weaker the strong interaction between them, so that when quarks are in extreme proximity, the nuclear force between them is so weak that they behave almost as free particles. Born in America but raised in Israel, David searches for the ultimate equations of fundamental physics—and thus rejects “anthropic arguments” that argue that the laws and constants of physics may not be absolute but simply determined randomly in our one universe among many.