‘A beautiful idea,’ said Nobel laureate Roger Penrose, ‘has a much better chance of being a right idea than an ugly idea.’
When poets and physicists agree on something, it is very likely that they share an important idea.
As part of our Angelicum High School Great Books for Academy discussions, we read poetry together. A couple of poems that caught my eye last year link truth to beauty.
The first poem is “Ode to a Grecian Urn” by John Keats, which ends with these lines:
‘Beauty is truth, truth is beauty’, that’s all
You know on Earth, and everything you need to know.
When I read these lines I was shocked, pleased and affirmed. “Beauty is truth, truth is beauty.” Of course it is. However, my initial training in this truth did not come from poetry, but from physics. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was beauty that initially drew me to physics. Having earned a degree in physics and then teaching, I read books on physics and about physics. It is commonplace for physicists to state bluntly that the beautiful theories are the ones that are true. So, I was glad and affirmed something that I already knew to be true.
The reason it was shocking is that I hadn’t found the idea so clearly expressed outside of physics. It was not just expressed outside of physics, but in a poem that, in many ways, has nothing to do with physics at all.
When there are physicists and poets who agree on a principle like that, there is probably something in what they are saying.
Listen to the testimony of the physicists.
Paul Dirac, a leading physicist of the 20th century, made the striking statement that “it is more important to have beauty in one’s own equations than to make them fit experiments.” Richard Feynman, another influential physicist of the 20th century, wrote: “You can recognize the truth by its beauty and simplicity.” The mathematician and theoretical physicist Roger Penrose wrote: “Aesthetic criteria are enormously valuable in forming our judgments. … A beautiful idea has a much better chance of being a correct idea than an ugly idea.”
Richard Feynman and Murray Gell-Mann had a theory that they thought was true based on her beauty, though it was contradicted by more than one experiment. It turned out that there was something wrong with the experiments and his theory was true. Gell-Mann commented:
The theory of weak interactions: there were nine experiments that contradicted it, all of them wrong. Everyone. When you have something simple that agrees with all the rest of physics and really seems to explain what’s going on, some experimental data against it is no objection. You are almost certainly wrong.
(This quote and others can be found at The new history of science by Augros and Stanciu.)
“Beauty is truth, truth is beauty.” So says John Keats through the Greek urn. Physicists would agree!
When discussing this poem, a poem by Emily Dickinson was quoted: “I died for beauty.” In this poem, who died for beauty, just buried, finds someone who died for truth being buried “in an adjoining room.” When each finds out why the other died, one declares that truth and beauty are the same, and therefore are brothers. Beauty is truth, truth beauty.
Even in the realm of mathematics, the great mathematician Henri Poincaré wrote: “Without a fairly high degree of this aesthetic instinct, no man will be a great mathematical discoverer.” (I found that quote, by the way, in a fascinating little book called The psychology of invention in the mathematical field, by mathematician and psychologist Jacques Hadamard.) Mathematics, indeed, has a pristine beauty of its own. The poet Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote: “Only Euclid has beheld Beauty naked.”
It is important to note that the kind of beauty that physicists (and poets and mathematicians) invoke is not simply what they like according to taste. They are appealing to something objective and universal, something that transcends taste and is certainly not merely in the eye of the beholder. The main characteristic of beauty is simplicity, also called totality or unity. In the cases of things with parts, there must be harmony or balance. In fact, the correct relationship between the parts contributes to the whole of the thing. Finally, the brightness or glow is the third characteristic. Beautiful things are enlightening, they allow introspection, they are intellectually attractive.
So what does beauty have to do with truth? A beautiful thing is true to what it is. A true man is one who is fully integrated. A true home lives up to what a home should be. Things that are true fall short of the ideal. When things are most fully themselves, they are harmonious and unified. That is why nothing on Earth is more beautiful than a saint.
And this is never more true when it comes to God, who is completely one, simple, undivided, and Beauty and Truth Itself. In the case of God, it is not only true that beauty is true, but that Beauty is Truth. From poets to scientists, this insightful and beautiful truth is proclaimed.
Source: news.google.com