Even when the evidence was going against them, Nobel prize-winners Murray Gell-Mann and Richard Feynman clung on to cherished theories just because they thought they were “beautiful”. Arthur I. Miller wonders what drove them
ARE beauty and science compatible? Do scientists have the right to use the word beauty? Could art and science even be forging a common visual language that brings them historically closer than ever?
For physicists and mathematicians, at least, the answer is an emphatic “yes”. In 2002, Steven Weinberg wrote: “The great equations of modern physics are a permanent part of scientific knowledge, which may outlast even the beautiful cathedrals of earlier ages.” And back in the 1960s, Paul Dirac famously asserted that: “It is more important to have beauty in one’s equations than to have them fit experiment.” Richard Feynman, too, insisted on believing in one of his theories even when it seemed to contradict experimental data. “There was a moment when I knew how nature worked,” he wrote in 1957. “[The theory] had elegance and beauty. The goddamn thing was gleaming.”
So what makes an equation or a theory beautiful? For most art theorists and artists, beauty is subjective, but not for scientists. To scientists symmetry is beauty and therefore objective: scientists seek out mathematical equations that retain their form no matter how they are transformed. The mathematical equation for a sphere, for example, does not change when its coordinates are inverted. A sphere is still a sphere when viewed from ...