Poet John Keats once said, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty, — that is all/Ye know on Earth, and all ye need to know.” I’ve been brooding over this formula since physicist Sabine Hossenfelder spoke at Stevens last month about her new book Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray.
Many modern physicists have touted beauty — which includes properties such as elegance, simplicity, and symmetry — as a guide to truth. The obvious problem is that beauty is subjective, and ideas about beauty vary across era and cultures. Moreover, allegedly beautiful ideas turn out to be false. Ancient Greeks, to whom the circle embodied geometric perfection, assumed the orbits of heavenly bodies must be circular. Wrong.
For decades, string theory has been the leading contender for a unified theory of physics, which unites quantum mechanics and relativity. Advocates of string theory extol its beauty, but after 40 years they have produced no empirical evidence for it. On her blog “BackReaction,” Hossenfelder notes that relying on beauty “has sometimes worked, and sometimes not. It’s just that many theoretical physicists prefer to recall only the cases where arguments from beauty did work.”
Polymath Douglas Hofstadter raised another objection to the linkage of truth and beauty when I interviewed him for my new book Mind-Body Problems. I had been struck by the artistry of his books Gödel, Escher, Bach and I Am a Strange Loop. During our conversation, he also kept raising aesthetic issues, for example when he explained why he left particle physics in the 1970s.
“I became more and more lost and repelled by the ugliness of theories that I was seeing,” Hofstadter said. “I just could not stomach any of it.” I assumed Hofstadter would be sympathetic to Keats’ “Beauty is truth” line. But when I mentioned it, Hofstadter snorted in disgust. Here is how I describe our subsequent exchange:
“That’s nonsense,” Hofstadter said [about truth is beauty]. “Absolute junk. That’s the opposite of what’s true. I hate that phrase.” He was so vehement that I started laughing. “Germany killed six million Jews,” he said, scowling. “That’s true. Does that make it beautiful? Come on. Nonsense.” I wasn’t laughing now. But your writing is so beautiful, I said, to mollify him, and because it is true. “I think we should try to bring as much beauty into the world as we can,” he replied, “since the world is so non-beautiful!”
In other words, truth is often repulsive, morally as well as aesthetically. Elsewhere in Mind-Body Problems, in a chapter on philosopher-novelist Rebecca Goldstein, I suggest that the arts might be a better route to self-understanding than science. But artistic beauty can lead us astray. That is why Plato wanted to exclude poets from his utopia.
Decades ago I saw Triumph of the Will, the Leni Riefenstahl documentary about a Nazi rally. Rationally, the film repulsed me. Viscerally, Riefenstahl’s beautiful music and imagery stirred me. When Hitler (a former artist!) hailed the hordes of adoring, gorgeous men, women, and children, part of me wanted to jump to my feet and cheer.
Humanities professors preach that great art makes you a better person, but that, like many platitudes we professors spout, is false. Stalin was an avid reader of literature, including poetry. He once told a group of writers, “The production of souls is more important than the production of tanks…. And therefore I raise my glass to you, writers, the engineers of the human soul.” By the time he died, Stalin had slaughtered almost as many people as Hitler.
Both these tyrants thought they were creating good, beautiful societies. So what’s my point? Life is ugly as well as beautiful, bad as well as good, and the path to truth — especially the truth about ourselves — is fraught with peril.
John Horgan directs the Center for Science Writings, which is part of the College of Arts & Letters. This column is adapted from one originally published on his Scientific American blog, “Cross-check.”
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