The Perilous Beauty Of Science

 Beauty most often resides firmly in the realm of art and perhaps philosophy. The ephemeral and nebulous concept of beauty is debated even to this day. So, the cold, rational, mathematical and empirical field of science is perhaps not where you would expect to find a lot of discussion about beauty. However, the concept of beauty in science has been prevalent since at least ancient Greece. The idea of beauty is discussed in almost all the major branches of science, like evolutionary biology, geology, organic chemistry etc. However, the most notable discussions on the subject can be found in mathematics and physics.

One of the first formal definitions of beauty actually comes from a mathematician. Pythagoras (famous for the Pythagoras theorem and infamous for being a cult leader) described beauty in universal terms, as something observed in the heavens. He saw the reflection of divine in the intricacies of mathematics. He was so enchanted with the idea of mathematics being perfect, that he hated the idea of irrational numbers (numbers like Pi, which can’t be exactly formulated in the format of a ratio, A/B).

This idea of beauty kept gaining momentum through the centuries as mathematics and physics developed to perfectly describe the physical universe we live in. Scientists we awestruck at the fact that a simple equation scribbled on a piece of paper could perfectly describe how the planets orbit the sun or what forces hold the atom together. An equation is often considered to be beautiful if it is simple in its form but describes something profound. An example of this would be, what is perhaps the most famous equation in the world, Einstein’s E = mc². It’s a simple algebraic equation which any high-school student can understand, but describes something incredible, that energy is equal to the mass of an object, multiplied by a constant number (the square of the speed of light). This simple equation changed our understanding of the universe at a fundamental level by saying that mass and energy are interchangeable.

The famous physicist Paul Dirac epitomizes this obsession for beauty in science. He once said that it is more important to have beauty in an equation than for it to fit experiments. And this is where a problem begins to appear in the approach. In the search for beautiful science, many physicists believe that theoretical physics has lost its way. Afterall, one of the core principles of any science is that it should be falsifiable. That means any scientific theory needs to make predictions which can be proved to be correct or incorrect by experiments or observations.

In the last few decades, we have seen a host of theories becoming popular which are ‘beautiful’ but are impossible to verify. Two such examples would be the Super Symmetry (playfully called SuSy) theory in particle physics and the String Theory in quantum gravity.

Artist - Mayram Maryam

There are a number of fundamental particles we have found in nature (like Higgs bosons, quarks etc). However, different theories describe different sets of these particles. That’s something physicists don’t really like. Afterall, isn’t it better if one single theory can describe multiple things? We have seen this happen too. Once electricity and magnetism were considered to be separate phenomena, until the theory of electromagnetism brought them together and described how both of these are related. Similarly, in particle physics, in an attempt to bring all these particles together under a single mathematical model, Super Symmetry was proposed. It was a beautiful theory, giving one elegant solution instead of the mess of multiple theories. It predicted the existence of various new, high energy particles. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in CERN was built to find these particles, along with various other high energy particles. While the LHC did find many high energy particles, including the famous Higgs boson, popularly called the God Particle, it did not find a single Super Symmetry particle. One would assume that such a failure would mark the death of SuSy, but physicists are still altering the theory to explain the failure.

Artist - Joan Raspo

Similarly, String Theory is another theory which attempts to unify two separate theories which don’t seem to play together. One is Einstein General Theory of Relativity (GTR), which describes gravity and the large-scale structures of the universe, like galaxies. The other is Quantum physics, which describes the tiniest things like electrons, protons and other particles. Individually, both these theories are phenomenally successful. Through multiple experiments, we have verified many aspects of these theories. However, when scientists try to combine them into one theory, which can be useful in understanding yet unknown things like the inside of a Black Hole or what happened at the exact moment of Big Bang, all hell breaks loose. Many attempts have been made to unify these two, the most popular of which is String Theory. It’s also a mathematically elegant theory, which perfectly combines various aspects of quantum physics with gravity. However, String Theory can be correct if our universe has 11 dimensions, instead of the 4 (3 of space and 1 of time) that we know of. This has been a major concern for physicists, who have tried to explain the apparent lack of extra dimensions in many ways, but again, none of them verifiable.

These massive failures in physics over the last few decades have lead many physicists to claim that the search for beautiful theories has lead us to a blind alley, where we are just creating beautiful, but nonsensical theories, which don’t help science. Afterall, what use is a beautiful theory if it can’t be tested to be true?