Sing, O Muse, of the insights of Einstein

A brief reflection on beauty, truth, and rationality

In “Great scientists follow intuition and beauty, not rationality”, Erik Hoel recapitulates developments in the history and philosophy of science to show that scientific progress is not simply a matter of applying rational analysis to well-defined problems. When we go beyond textbook accounts of the scientific method and look at actual scientific breakthroughs, we find non-rational or maybe even irrational dimensions to scientific progress. I say “recapitulates”, because these points have been made before (cf. Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend; Robert Pirsig even worked some of these ideas into his most famous novel), but they bear repeating in new formats for a new generation’s benefit, and some of Hoel’s examples were new to me.

Hoel connects this understanding of scientific progress to another old idea: that Beauty and Truth are one.

“Fractal Broccoli”, by Jon Sullivan. Public domain, via Wikimedia

Are they? On this point, I do not find Hoel’s argument convincing. Hoel’s own examples belie his thesis. Hoel suggests that geniuses such as Einstein were driven by some aesthetic intuition to great insights that paragons of analytical rationality such as von Neumann could not see, but Hoel also acknowledges that those same geniuses could be gripped by chimerical idées fixes. In the mind of the genius the authentic insight and the phantasm were connected, sharing some aesthetic value that the geniuses found compelling. It was the rationality of the more prosaic scientists (or their prosaic methods, dutifully applied by the geniuses) that separated the wheat from the chaff and distinguished between the ideas that advanced science and those that were mere mirages or wills o’ the wisp leading nowhere.

Hoel raises the possibility that those fixations of the geniuses that have so far not passed rational testing may someday be shown to be true, but such an appeal is unfalsifiable. For the time being, pace Einstein’s aesthetic resistance to the idea, it appears that God does play dice with the universe.

Speaking of which, I would add another example: Max Planck. Investigating the problem of black box radiation, he was confronted by the phenomenon of discrete energy states. Confronted and confounded, for his aesthetic sense recoiled at the discontinuity that his data revealed. But after repeated experiments, he felt he had to accept what the experiments were showing, unwillingly taking the first steps towards what we now know as quantum theory.

Here are poems by Dickinson and Poe on Beauty and Truth, which I have used in classroom exercises on the topic:

Emily Dickinson: “I died for Beauty - but was scarce”

I died for Beauty - but was scarce
Adjusted in the Tomb
When One who died for Truth, was lain
In an adjoining Room -

He questioned softly "Why I failed"?
"For Beauty", I replied -
"And I - for Truth - Themself are One -
We Brethren are", He said -

And so, as Kinsmen, met a Night —
We talked between the Rooms -
Until the Moss had reached our lips -
And covered up - Our names -

Edgar Allen Poe: “Sonnet - to Science”

Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art!
Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.
Why preyest thou thus upon the poet’s heart,
Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?
How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise,
Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering
To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies,
Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing?
Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car,
And driven the Hamadryad from the wood
To seek a shelter in some happier star?
Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood,
The Elfin from the green grass, and from me
The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?

More to the point, here is Poe in prose, from his essay, “The Poetic Principle” :

To recapitulate, then: — I would define, in brief, the Poetry of words as The Rhythmical Creation of Beauty. Its sole arbiter is Taste. With the Intellect or with the Conscience, it has only collateral relations. Unless incidentally, it has no concern whatever either with Duty or with Truth.

Questions about how Beauty relates to Truth and Goodness go back at least as far as Plato in Western philosophy. The issue remains unsettled, Hoel’s examples notwithstanding. But such examples suggest that, even if Beauty is not Truth, Beauty can lead us to Truth, as long as reason gets the last word.

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We lost David Lynch recently, in whose honor I would like to say something about the connection between Beauty and horror, but my ideas on this point are not sufficiently worked out. I speculate that a capacity to experience horror is a necessary concomitant of the capacity to experience beauty, and that the opposition between Beauty and horror is an opposition between two realities, i.e. not simply a contrast between something real and its privation, as with light and dark, heat and cold, or good and evil. Ugliness is the privation of beauty, but horror is not simply a privation but a real thing in its own right. Life is beautiful, and life is horrible.