Thursday, April 17, 2008

Beauty and truth in physics

Herewith an extension to The quark, the jaguar, and the laws of Jurisdynamics:

Murray Gell-Mann: Beauty and truth in physics

Wielding laypeople's terms and a sense of humor, Nobel Prize winner Murray Gell-Mann drops some knowledge about particle physics, asking questions like, Are elegant equations more likely to be right than inelegant ones? Can the fundamental law, the so-called "theory of everything," really explain everything? His answers will surprise you.

Murray Gell-Mann brings visibility to a crucial aspect of our existence that we can't actually see: elemental particles. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics for introducing quarks, one of two fundamental ingredients for all matter in the universe.

The upshot? Gell-Mann's short answers:
  • Beauty matters
  • Math matters
  • Symmetry matters
Beautiful theories are likelier to be correct, and true theories are likelier to be beautiful. Sweet.
at

1 comment:

  1. Patrick S. O'Donnell4/18/2008 7:04 PM

    For those (the layperson, nonexpert, etc.) interested in further reading on this sort of thing, please see, for instance, the classic collection of lectures by S. Chandrasekhar, Truth and Beauty: Aesthetics and Motivations in Science (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1987), Ian Stewart's Why Beauty is Truth: The History of Symmetry (New York: Basic Books, 2007), and A. Zee's Fearful Symmetry: The Search for Beauty in Modern Physics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999 ed.).

    ReplyDelete