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I’m nowhere near qualified enough in general relativity to evaluate their claims, but when I see something like this: “This is aesthetically pleasing, as natur
by evancox100 5y ago
I’m nowhere near qualified enough in general relativity to evaluate their claims, but when I see something like this:
“This is aesthetically pleasing, as nature seems to strive for harmony, efficiency and simplicity.”
it makes me think they are not being the most objective evaluators of reality.
- KhoomeiK 5y agoAesthetics, harmony, and simplicity are the guiding principles of mathematical conjecture. This piece is simply hypothesizing about a link while calling for further empirical research.
- haskellandchill 5y agoNo, that's just fluff. Occam's Razor is all there is to it.
- catlifeonmars 5y agoOccam’s razor more or less manifests as elegance in mathematics.
- enkid 5y agoAesthetics should have nothing to do with science. Aesthetics is the reason we thought the Earth was at the center of the universe and everything outside the orbit of the moon was made of perfect spheres. It's why the Soviet Union pushed Lamarckian biology instead of Darwinism.
- bullsbarry 5y agoThe earth is at the center of the visible universe.
- mellosouls 5y agoOnly to observers on earth...
- riffraff 5y agoAlso in the Tycho Brahe system Earth is at the center of the solar system but it is equivalent to the Copernican one, you can just change the coordinates. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tychonic_system https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tychonic_system
- enkid 5y agoAnd that was a complete mess if a system when you start considering moons orbiting around planets orbiting around the sun orbiting around the Earth. Not to mention anything outside our solar system.
- enkid 5y agoI don't know what point you are making. That's how observation works... The observer is always at the center of their own universe.
- golemotron 5y ago> Aesthetics is the reason we thought the Earth was at the center of the universe Nope, that was hubris.
- kilpikaarna 5y agoTo scholastic thinking it was the heliocentric view that was hubris, since it didn't place the Earth at the lowest level of creation where it belonged.
- golemotron 5y agoThat makes sense. Hubris is always what the other person does.
- enkid 5y agoHubris that what humans consider aesthetic is somehow important to the Universe.
- golemotron 5y agoDon't neglect the fact that aesthetic sense is evolved. To the degree that our perception has connection with reality we'll probably find spheres beautiful because they manifest an elemental mathematical relation that is ubiquitous in nature.
- March_f6 5y agoThere are copious amounts of examples showing how Nature is attracted to symmetry(a form of beauty). Why wouldn't we use this is evidence as a heuristic?
- enkid 5y agoYou just gave a non-aesthetic reason to explore symmetry. I'm not saying we should only look at theories that are not beautiful, but instead we should not use that to evaluate if a theory is worth exploring.
- lalalandland 5y agoIt's a big issue for several fields of science. Sabine Hossenfelder Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray https://aeon.co/ideas/beauty-is-truth-truth-is-beauty-and-other-lies-of-physics https://aeon.co/ideas/beauty-is-truth-truth-is-beauty-and-ot...
- samatman 5y agoCopernican theory made worse predictions than Ptolemaic theory, but it was simpler. Both explained the same facts. The acceptance of heliocentricity was an aesthetic judgement, one which favored simplicity, and predated the work on elliptical orbits which gave the Copernican theory, thusly modified, equivalent predictive power.
- enkid 5y agoThis is not true. Copernican theory allowed the existences of moons around other planets and explained the phases of Venus when seen through a telescope. The Copernican model allowed things that the Aristotlean model did not and those things exist in the universe. The Aesthetics of having an Earth centered Universe prevented these truths from being quickly and easily accepted.
- CyberRabbi 5y ago> it makes me think they are not being the most objective evaluators of reality. Generally in physics and in maths researchers tend to spend time evaluating solutions that are symmetrical or otherwise elegant. I suppose that does make us biased but we’re searching for answers in a very large space of possible answers. Beaming towards elegant solutions seems like a reasonable heuristic.
- jgrowl 5y agoRelevant: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/beauty-in-physics/ https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/beauty-in-physics/
- wwweston 5y agoSince we’re part of reality and products of reality, we are most definitely not independently objective. On the other hand, some our aesthetics could be founded in an adaptive sense for reality.
- dr_dshiv 5y agoThe entire universe is like a free-energy minimization machine. Everything is astonishingly optimized.