Art Theory

How Beauty Leads Physics Astray



Santa Fe Institute

To develop new laws of nature, physicists routinely rely on arguments from beauty. This method has worked badly and has resulted in 40 years of stagnation in the foundations of physics. Dozens of costly experiments were commissioned but failed to confirm any of the physicists’ beautiful hypotheses. In this SFI Community Lecture, science writer Sabine Hossenfelder explains what physicists mean when they say a theory is beautiful, what went wrong with their reliance on it, and how the field can move on.

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4 thoughts on “How Beauty Leads Physics Astray
  1. In Art? Artists aspire to cohesive composition, colour harmony etc but if the underlying emotive force one is attempting to express is chaos & disorder, cognitive dissonance etc then the appropriate composition would not be one of beauty but something more unsettling.

  2. I don´t think she understands Occam´s razor. The reason for simple theories is that they generalise. Clearly this depends on the assumption that the universe has a fundamental set of laws from which all other phenomena can be derived…which I don't personally believe is true

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