← Philosophy For Our Times
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- [00:00]
Lisa Randall
Mom, can you tell me a story?
- [00:02]
Carvana/Progressive Advertiser
Sure.
- [00:02]
Lisa Randall
Once upon a time, a mom needed a new car. Was she brave? She was tired, mostly. But she went to Carvana.com and found a great car at a great price. No secret treasure map required. Did she have to fight a dragon?
- [00:13]
Carvana/Progressive Advertiser
Nope.
- [00:14]
Lisa Randall
She bought it 100% online from her bed, actually. Was it scary? Honey, it was as unscary as car buying could be. Did the car have a sunroof? It did, actually. Okay, good story.
- [00:24]
Carvana/Progressive Advertiser
Car buying.
- [00:25]
Lisa Randall
You'll want to tell stories about. Buy your car today on Carvana. Delivery fees may apply. Good ideas were rejected because the inventors considered them too ugly. Max Planck didn't even believe in photons, which he thought an unpleasant concept, even though he initiated the train of logic that led to their conjecture. As you heard earlier, Einstein thought the expanding universe that followed from his equations of general relativity couldn't be true, in part because it contradicted his aesthetic and philosophical predispositions. And neither of these ideas might have seemed the most beautiful at the time. But the laws of physics and the universe in which they applied didn't really care.
- [01:09]
Omari Edwards
Welcome to Philosophy for Our Times, the podcast brought to you by the Institute of Art and Ideas. I'm your host, Omari Edwards. Beauty has long been seen as a guide to truth. From elegant equations of fundamental physics to the beautiful symmetries of the natural world, many of history's greatest scientists have believed that the most beautiful theories are also the most likely to be correct. But what if beauty is just another human bias? Can aesthetic judgment really lead us towards scientific discovery? Or does it just distract us from the evidence? On the messy collisions of ugly facts with beautiful theory and which one should give way? In this talk, pioneering theoretical physicist Lisa Randall explores the complicated relationship between beauty and scientific truth. Drawing on examples from modern physics, she examines whether our aesthetic principles have inspired genuine breakthroughs, where they have misled researchers, and why science ultimately depends on evidence rather than elegance. Lisa is the Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard University. Her books Walked Passages and Knocking on Heaven's Door were both named among the New York Times 100 Notable Books. This is Lisa Randall on truth, beauty, and other scientific misconceptions.
- [02:52]
Lisa Randall
Hi there. I'm Professor Lisa Randall. I'm a professor of physics at Harvard. I also have written several books, including the book Knocking on Heaven's Door. And the Talk I'm Going to Give Today is very much taken from a chapter with the same title from that book. The book was about the Large Hadron Collider. It was also about the methods of science and how we deduce things. So the title is Truth and Beauty and Other Scientific Misconceptions. And I'll talk about the role I think they play. So I'm just going to start by talking a little bit about art and science and the relationship, but mostly to look for how beauty can be a guide or what we're looking for. And I just remind you that it's kind of funny now because actually, beauty is not necessarily a guide in art. I mean, this is Damien Hearst art. And I don't think anyone would actually say that was beautiful, but it is worth a lot of money. This is physics. This is a very elegant equation, the Einstein field equation. It looks really compact. From this equation, we can derive the expansion of the universe, we can derive the equations of black holes, we can derive how to throw a ball. It's just has a lot of stuff in it, but it's written in a very compact notation. If you actually really worked out what it is, and this is in terms of the metric, it would look like that. And, you know, you could expand out all the summations and then it would just wouldn't fit on my slide. So it's the same physics, but in one case you might say it looks really beautiful. In the other case it doesn't. And I say this not because I'm going to make a decision about this. I'm saying that, you know, when you decide if something is beautiful, you have to think about what you're really deciding about. And here one formulation looks a lot more elegant than the other. And I don't think anyone would debate that. So beauty is not necessarily a criterion in art, but often we have this idea that we associate successful science with beauty. And it's a lovely notion that might have some validity, but it's also subjective and maybe even meaningless at times. As I'm going to argue, it also depends on our cultural context and also how long we've been studying a particular science. This is not to say the science itself is culturally dependent, but whether we consider it beautiful might be. I was actually recently at a conference where I ran into a friend of the recently departed great physicist Stephen Weinberg, and she was telling me that she was talking about the Standard Model, even though they hadn't yet found one of the particles needed to establish its validity. This is the standard model of particle physics for which he received the Nobel Prize. And what he said was that it was just so beautiful, it just had to be right. And this is a notion that a lot of physicists claim, especially after the fact, after we know things are beautiful and correct. So other physicists have said that in my chapter I talk about Murray galman, and in 2007 he talked about the topic of truth and beauty and science. And people loved the talk. It was a talk at the TED conference which probably some of you have heard of. And he echoed John Keats and said truth is beauty and beauty is truth. And he had made some of his most significant Nobel Prize winning discoveries about the objects we call quarks, which are inside progens and neutrons, by searching for an underlying principle that could elegantly organize the seemingly random set of data that had been discovered at that time. And in fact he made a prediction of a particle that confirmed that this theory works. As we know, we never really can prove a theory, but we can rule it out, but we can certainly have evidence that a theory is correct in a certain regime. And his theory looked really good. So in his experience, the search for beauty, and perhaps it was just simplicity, had led to truth. Like I said, the audience loved it, no one disputed it. And I think people really like this idea that truth and beauty go together and that the search for one will more often than not reveal the other. But it's kind of a slippery assumption. We'd like to believe that beauty is at the heart of great scientific theories and truth will always be aesthetically satisfying. But beauty really is subjective and it's not a reliable arbiter of truth. It's a guide, but it's not a decider. And the basic problem with the identification is that it holds when it holds. And if they really were equivalent, the words ugly truth would never have entered our vocabulary. So even though those words weren't specifically directed towards science, observations about the world just aren't always beautiful. And Darwin's colleague Thomas Huxley nicely summarized the sentiment when he said science is organized common sense where many a beautiful theory was killed by an ugly fact. So we do like to. I'll talk about what we mean when we say beauty and why. I think there's some validity to it, but we have to be careful and we can't overstate. And certainly if you're talking to people who are not scientists, it's very. I find it really important to be responsible about what we're saying. So I think it's important to say what we really mean when we say beauty and how much we trust it. So there's this disconcerting observation that the universe and its elements aren't entirely Beautiful. I mean, there certainly are many things we have come to see as beautiful. There are many aspects. But we also observe a plethora of messy phenomena and a zoo of particles. We'd like to understand. And ideally, we'd like to find a simple theory capable of explaining all the observations, that uses only a spare set of rules and the fewest possible fundamental ingredients. But we often need many further steps to connect this theory to our world. So even if we had a grand unified theory, that number of steps that it takes to get to what we actually see is quite large. And so the theory that might have seemed elegant might not seem elegant by the time we get to matching reality. And that's because the universe is complex. And again, that's not to say that having beauty as a guide doesn't help us find fundamental underlying theories, but it does not mean that the simplest theory is the most beautiful one. And sometimes it's better to take into account the whole story, how that theory connects to our world before deciding whether it's beautiful or not. Sometimes a theory that might seem slightly more complicated might, in the end, be much more simple in some sense. But new ingredients and principles are generally needed before we can connect this simple, spare formulation to more complicated surrounding world. These additional ingredients can destroy the beauty present in the initial proposed formulation, much as earmarks all too often interfere with the congressional bill's initial idealistic legislation. So the search for underlying principles that illuminate connections among superficially disparate observed phenomena maybe studies specific solvable theories in which difficult mathematical formulations tackle toy problems. So I'm talking about different ways people might approach this. So there are some scientists who are very mathematical. They might start with problems not necessarily relevant to any real physical setup and might only later find applications to observable physical phenomena. Other theorists prefer to do things only when they can immediately see the experimental predictions. And some of them really like calculating those predictions. So that's another way of doing science. And some people just really like computing. But all of these things, interesting principles, advanced mathematics, and complicated numerical simulations, they're all part of physics. We're not going to say one is right and one is not. And many physics scientists value all of them. But usually we choose our priorities according to what we find most pleasing or really what most likely to lead to scientific advances. But the fact is, we often just choose the approach which suits us the best and where we think as individuals, we will make the most progress. And again, that's not to say anyone is right or wrong, but it's the combination of everyone working together from these different angles that often has led to progress. Beauty is also time dependent. Not only do current views of beauty vary, but as true with art, they evolve over time. Actually, it's really interesting that Galman's specialty, which was quantum chromodynamics, which is a theory of the strong force used to describe how quarks interact with particles called gluons. That mediative force presents an excellent case in point. Gelman's conjecture about the strong nuclear force was based on a brilliant insight about how many particles that were constantly being discovered in the 60s could be organized into sensible patterns. And he hypothesized the existence of more basic elementary particles known as quarks. And the quarks interacted via the strong nuclear force that acts on this charge, the charge they carry and would bind together to form neutral objects, much as electrons bind with nuclei to form neutral atoms. But it's a slightly more complicated theory, and if true, all the particles being discovered could be interpreted as bound states of these quarks, aggregate objects that carry no net strong interaction charge. And he realized if there are three different types of quarks, each of which carried a distinct color charge, many such combinations of neutral bound states could form. And they did correspond to the particles that were being found. So that seemed pretty beautiful. He had found a way of organizing this very messy set of data according to this strong nuclear force. But when Murray and George Dweig also proposed this idea, people didn't even believe it was a proper scientific theory. And the reason is technical but interesting. Particle physics calculations rely on particles not interacting when they're far apart, so that we can compute the finite effects of the interactions that occur when they get close together. With this assumption, any interaction can be entirely captured by the local forces that apply when the interacting particles are in close proximity. But the force that Gellmann had conjectured was stronger when particles were further apart. That meant that quarks would always interact according to that theory. And according to the then reigning criteria. Gellmann's guess didn't even correspond to a true theory that could be used for reliable calculations. Because quarks would always interact. Even their so called asymptotic states seem very complicated and apparent concession to ugliness. The asymptotic states that postulate were not the simple particles you'd like to see in a calculable theory. Initially, no one knew how to organize the calculations. But today's physicists think oppositely about the strong force. We now understand it much better than we did when the idea was first proposed. David Gross, David Palitzer and Frank Wilczek won the Nobel Prize for what they called asymptotic freedom. According to their calculations, the force is strong only at low energies and long distances. At high energies, the strong force is not much more powerful than other forces, and calculations work just as they should. In fact, some physicists might even think this is the only legitimate type of theory, since otherwise you run into problems with indefinite strength at high energy. It's an interesting example of the interplay between aesthetic and scientific criteria. Simplicity was its initial guide, but hard scientific calculations and theoretical insights were necessary before everyone could agree on the beauty of his suggestion. Many of our most trusted theories have aspects so superficially ugly and uncompelling that even respected and well established physics scientists rejected them initially. Quantum field theory, which combines quantum mechanics and special relativity, underlies all the particle physics. But the Nobel Prize winning Italian physicist Enrico Fermi rejected at first from. The problem was that although quantum field theory formalizes and systematizes calculations and makes many correct predictions, it involves calculation of techniques that even some of today's physicists viewers various aspects of the theory are quite beautiful and lead to remarkable insights. Other features we basically just have to put up with, even though we aren't so enamored with their subtlety or beauty. Maybe eventually we'll think of something better, but right now, sometimes it looks like a klude. And this story has repeated itself many times since. Beauty is often only agreed on after we understand things. Weak interactions violate parity symmetry, the symmetry that changes particles spinning to the left to particle spinning to the right. And that seems pretty disturbing and unattractive. But this very asymmetry is what is responsible for the range of masses we see in the world, which is in turn necessary for a structure in life. Everything interesting relies on this violation. So is this considered ugly at first, yet now we know it's essential. And maybe it's ugly in itself. But parity, symmetry breaking leads to beautiful explanations of more complicated phenomena essential to all the matter we see. So it's pretty clear beauty is not absolute. An idea might appeal to its creator, but be cumbersome and messy from someone else's perspective. Sometimes I'll think something's really cool because it's such a nice idea compared to everything else that's there. But being better doesn't mean it's beautiful. And sometimes being beautiful really means you can tell it to someone who's never thought about the problem and thinks, what a great idea. Which is a really Hard criterion to meet a lot of the time in very complicated physics. We do. Also, sometimes good ideas were rejected because the inventors considered them too ugly. Max Planck didn't even believe in photons, which he thought an unpleasant concept. Photons are these particles that mediated electromagnetism. Even though he initiated the train of logic that led to their conjecture. As you heard earlier, Einstein thought the expanding universe that followed from his equations of general relativity couldn't be true, in part because it contradicted his aesthetic and philosophical predispositions. I mean, I think his biggest blunder wasn't necessarily the cosmological constant. It was not thinking, it was not recognizing that he was making this really cool prediction that the universe could expand, was expanding, and he was rejecting him. And neither of these ideas might have seemed the most beautiful at the time, but the laws of physics and the universe in which they applied didn't really care. So it's difficult to pin down beauty in art, and it's difficult to pin down beauty in science. So I'm just going to say a couple of words about art. People do sometimes agree on what's beautiful, and maybe that's cultural and maybe it's intrinsic. I think balance is a good criteria. I mentioned David in the Ufuzi. I don't have a picture here, but Richard Serra sculptures, they're also kind of interesting in terms of balance. Symmetry is important. It's important in every culture we see. It's important for every religion. Every symbol has a symmetry to it, but the violation of symmetry is maybe as critical. And in art we certainly see lots of very symmetrical things, but we see the lack of symmetry in Japanese art that makes it so interesting. And I love this because this is really the way the world is. It seems to have some underlying symmetries that get maybe slightly broken and that creates beauty in the world. Otherwise you just have wallpaper. The thing that makes it really interesting is the violations of the symmetries too, which makes it a little more complicated, but a lot more interesting. The goals today in science are to go beyond the well established theories and find the missing pieces, extend our knowledge base, make discoveries that can't be explained with only the current framework, and use experiments to choose among them. And truth and beauty and lack thereof are guides. That doesn't mean they're going to tell us the answer. But of course we want things that look simple enough that we can actually think they're credible. We don't want to have to match each parameter with a new part of our theory. We want Theories that can predict things. So symmetry is part of the story and we have to explain underlying symmetries and their breaking. Simplicity is again subjective, but the world is not working according to unified theory. If there is unified theory, it's clearly broken. But having some underlying structures with simplicity might be nice. But what would be really nice is having the theory that has the unified theory and is breaking to our world and agree, everyone agreeing that that's simple and that really hasn't been done. So I said the simplicity. But I do think consistency is always a driving force in physics. I don't know that I would call it beautiful, but there is some sort of internal calm that I get from when things make sense, when things are consistent. So maybe that's a form of beauty. Certainly my yoga teacher would think so. But economy might be a better thing too, to have as few ingredients as possible to explain as much as you can. Because, you know, things always seem simpler once you understand them. And we also have to remember that a theory is going to be thrown away, no matter how beautiful it is, if it doesn't agree with measurements. Now we have to be careful about what we saying when it doesn't agree with measurements, because we heard something slightly contradictory about supersymmetry. My supersymmetry can still be part of an underlying theory, for example, even though we haven't discovered it because it is broken and the question is what scale it's broken. So as with all these things, we have to be very careful when we define, to define precisely what we mean by something existing by some symmetry being broken. And recognize also that scales are involved and the world doesn't always look the same at all different scales. So how do we make scientific advantages, advances to pose the right questions? I think it's important to believe in your theory, but also be uncertain. I mean, you heard about humility of science, but high scientists, come on, let's face it, they seem pretty arrogant at times. But what's really important to be confident and questioning at the same time, to think you can actually, I mean, you have to be somewhat confident to think you can actually understand the universe. But you have to be humble to say I'm not going to believe my theory just because I made it up. It has to be something that really agrees with data. And so I think there's competition, collaboration, and some of the insights are similar to those in art. So we do use aesthetic criteria. But ultimately experiments decide, we sample ideas and test them. And skill is important. But to focus on the mechanism at hand, it helps us organize our thinking. So my research, I try to go beyond the standard model of particle physics. There might be new ingredients, new forces, even new dimensions of space. And by new, I don't mean they're new in the sense of just came into being. I mean new in the sense that we haven't observed them yet. But maybe there are things that ultimately will be simpler to explain if those dimensions exist. And maybe even if we're lucky, we'll find some experimental evidence. So this is just a random picture that I think shows that things can be simple but also complex at the same time. This is from Raphael's drawings. So I'm just going to conclude with the COVID of the book. And if you want to read more about how we think about science, and the science of the LHC in particular, you can read Knocking on Heaven's Door. Thank you.
- [22:09]
Omari Edwards
You've been listening to Lisa Randall on truth, beauty, and other scientific misconceptions. Beauty may inspire scientific imagination, but as Randall reminds us, nature is under no obligation to conform to our preferences. And whilst the history of science does suggest that elegance can be a powerful guide, it is, and many have argued, always will be experiment and observation that will decide which theories survive. But is this just another instantiation of scientism gone mad? Does the question of a guide to truth really make any sense? If you enjoyed this podcast, please take a moment to rate and review Philosophy for Our Times on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen. It really does help more people discover the world's leading thinkers and their ideas. For more talks, articles, videos and debates on philosophy, science, politics and culture, visit the Institute of Art and Ideas at IAI tv. From all of us at Philosophy for Our Times, thank you for listening. We'll see you next time
- [23:24]
Carvana/Progressive Advertiser
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