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In 2015, physicist Frank Wilczek published A Beautiful Question, a delight everyone should read, which he described as a meditation on the question, “Does the world embody beautiful ideas?” Some three hundred pages after propounding the question, he reaches “yes” as the answer.
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Then, in 2018, physicist Sabine Hossenfelder published Lost in Math, a nicely readable tour de force in which she claims that progress in quantum physics in our time has hit a brick wall because its researchers are questing for beauty instead of experimental fact.
No one can define the term “beauty” to the satisfaction of all. But a most salient feature of beauty is the universal human appreciation of it. Is there a human anywhere who does not admire a view of mountains, lakes, forests, seascapes, or butterflies? We disagree among ourselves on so much; why are we in such agreement on beauty?
The logical path for Wilczek to prove his thesis would be to define beauty, show that the natural world embodies an idea, and then prove that the idea embodied is beautiful. Wilczek’s choice of path was to assume the natural world is the embodiment of an idea, which he confirmed in 300 pages of examples. Then, in those same 300 pages, he skillfully appealed to the universal human concurrence on beauty to show that the embodiment is beautiful and, from that, to infer that the idea embodied itself is beautiful.
