Noson Yanofsky, in The Outer Limits of Reason, talks about physicists and what some of them most desire:
Another methodology that scientists use to find and select different theories is beauty. Scientists insist that a theory must, in some sense, be beautiful. The world-famous physicist Hermann Weyl is quoted as saying, “My work always tried to unite the true with the beautiful, but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful.” Paul Dirac had similar sentiments: “It is more important to have beauty in one’s equations than to have them fit experiment … it seems that if one is working from the point of view of getting beauty in one’s equations, and if one has really a sound insight, one is on a sure line of progress.”
First reaction is a little bit of queasy horror: they do what? They don’t want to verify the theories, the mathematics, are congruent with a bit of real-world experimentation?
In our discussions concerning free will, we mentioned that some physical phenomenon are not easily described by mathematics, and suggested that this means reality is not a mathematical artifact as a few scientists, such as Tegmark have suggested (this is known as Mathematical universe hypothesis), but rather a tool for studying reality. As a tool that describes a phenomena that doesn’t necessarily have to follow the tool’s rules, it may be acceptable to follow one’s preference for beauty over accuracy. Although I’m not persuaded.
I’m more inclined to believe this subclass of scientists are simply a collection of romantics. A very odd bunch, of course.
Or, at least for those following Mathematical universe hypothesis, they see themselves creating new realities as they create these mathematical structures (ala Zelazny’s Nine Princes in Amber), and strive to create the most beautiful realities possible.
But a bit more from Noson:
What exactly is beauty? The term is just as hard to define in science as in regular life. Some physicists have equated beauty with elegance, which is an equally indefinable concept. Some have said that beauty is related to simplicity, which is basically what Occam’s razor is all about. And still others have said that a theory is beautiful if it exhibits a lot of symmetry or harmony. There is much disagreement because no one has a sure-fire explanation for what exactly to look for or why this property works at picking good theories.
So it’s all a little confused and not formalized. Noson let’s the inimitable Bertrand Russell have the final go:
“Academic philosophers, ever since the time of Parmenides, have believed that the world is a unity … The most fundamental of my intellectual beliefs is that this is rubbish. I think the universe is all spots and jumps, without unity, without continuity, without coherence or orderliness or any of the other properties that governesses love.”
I suspect Mr Russell would have considered parts of the universe fundamentally unmathematical.
