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Progressive Summary of 2. What a Wonderful World

Today, you hear arguments about things like Beauty, being the most effective guide to discovering truths about the laws of nature, largely because this is the method that many of the Titans of Physics used, and have stated that they use.

The issue here, is that these arguments, descend from a time when science and religious beliefs were intimately linked, within the work of these scientists. Newton, the creator of Newtonian, or Classical Mechanics, believed his observations to be influenced by God. This is also the individual who, alongside Gottfried Leibnitz invented Calculus. Leibniz in fact, believed that the earth is the pinnacle of creation.

It should not be forgotten just how powerful and threatening the Church was, and how steadfastly it was willing to stand in the way of scientific advancements, to preserve the integrity of unprovable axioms.

Today, we realize that these are entirely un-scientific arguments, however, it doesn't seem to be present in the scientific community, that these arguments directly descend from theological influences, and thus may not be helpful when faced with a decision about what to do when faced with a contradiction in ones theory: do you push on because your theory is beautiful, in hopes of a resolution later down the road?

This is the road String Theorists seem to have taken, which is not to say that it hasn't done amazing work in the area of fleshing out the Black Hole Information Paradox (which we learned about deeply from Leonard Susskind lectures).

As much as we would probably like to believe this is a relic of the bygone past of science, it's not. Max Planck who was one of the greatest of his time, and anyone with a slight grasp of the field is very familiar with his contributions, such as the Planck Mass, is on record saying "the holiness of the unintelligible Godhead is conveyed by the holiness of symbols". Eventually, the references to the spiritual were replaced with the most mystical of the mundane properties: beauty.

Most major contributors to Physics in the 20th century (I hesitate to say all but this might be a rare acceptable use of an absolute, relied on, defended and exalted this property. Dirac is quoted as saying "Physical laws should have mathematical beauty", as well as "The research worker, in his efforts to express the fundamental laws of Nature in mathematical form, should strive mainly for mathematical beauty." and notably, the period of his life where he focused most intensely on whether or not his work or the mathematics of an idea met his standard of beauty, was the least productive.

One of the main expressions of Beauty, seems to be Symmetry.

Making something symmetrical, is a way of simplifying the situation, and of course, simplicity lends itself to Elegance, a property that sits well alongside beauty.

When we say symmetry, we mean, congruences, sequences, that can be captured in math as an expression of symmetry between two things.

An example of rotational symmetry, lies within the sky, as instead of telling you what color it is at any given direction, I can say it's that color in any direction you can look. The color of the sky is symmetric between any combination of the directions you could find, and thus you could say the sky is invariant under rotation (a type of transformation).

One of the biggest examples of the power of symmetry is the derivation of the quark model, by Murray Gell-Mann, which used two observed properties of seemingly unrelated composite particles to be brought into an organized relationship with each other. After probing the particles making up the Nucleus of particles, they stumbled upon Pions, Kaons, Sigma Particles, and more. Gell-Man brought order to this particle rumpus, and then pushed it one step further, as it began to dawn on scientists that these particles themselves were not the last level of structures to be observed, leading him to predict an entirely new class of particles, called quarks. He too, was swayed by beauty, saying that "...a beautiful or elegant theory is more likely to be right than a theory that is inelegant."

Physics has a major problem with Quantum Mechanics, because it does not align with the ideas of beauty, about the ratios, symmetries, and whatnot, that physicists have, which is insane to me: how does one have such a strong assertion about what form the secrets of nature should take when they are found?

Even Quantum Electrodynamics from which Richard Feynman gained his notoriety, has been pilloried by the aforementioned P.A.M. Dirac, who stated "I might have thought that the new ideas were correct if they had not been so ugly."

Referenced in

**Progressive Summary of 2. What a Wonderful World**