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Physics needs an aesthetic revolution

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https://iai.tv/articles/the-imperfect-un..._auid=2020

EXCERPTS (Marcelo Gleiser): Let’s start with Plato. He distrusted the senses. To him, to base our understanding of the world on what our senses can capture of it is a sure path to delusion. To find truth we must dive into the world of ideas, of undistilled reason.

[...] Plato used the [cave] allegory to push his point that the senses are deceitful, that what we see and perceive of the world is not the truth. ... Plato’s move was to extract human fallibility from the act of observing. Only the purest reaches of reason can open the gates to trustworthy knowledge, what philosopher Thomas Nagel called the “God’s eye view.”

To many mathematicians (especially pure mathematicians), their job is more of a calling, a means to extract the beyond-human aspects of reality. Faithful to Pythagoras and Plato, the belief here is that the mathematical blueprint of reality can be slowly unveiled by the persistent application of deductive logic.

Theoretical physics uses mathematics to model the parts of the material world we can measure. There is no doubt that this can be done in spectacularly efficient ways, a project that started also in Ancient Greece and that continues today. [...] The laws of nature tell us of quantities that remain the same in the face of change ... The dream, the final dream, is to obtain an all-encompassing bottom-up theory of everything, containing all matter and its interactions, Keats’ Grecian Urn turned theoretical physics. Symmetry = Beauty = Truth.

The dream of complete unification is built upon an illusion, the illusion of mathematical perfection reflected in nature. This aesthetics of beauty confuses models with reality, what philosopher Edmund Husserl called “subreptitious substitution.” Models are approximations that must necessarily neglect details to be useful. The map is not the territory. The subreptitious substitution is to believe that the models are nature and not approximations to it. As a result, the model builder tends to ignore annoying imperfections, such as asymmetries that may interfere with the grand plan.

However, asymmetries and imperfections are everywhere and are essential to how nature works. [...] Asymmetry is the engine of change. We know this intuitively from the importance of imbalance to propel things into motion. Perfection is stale, unmoving, boring...

The arts abandoned the old aesthetics of perfection = symmetry = truth more than a century ago. [...] Nature has its own aesthetics of the imperfect. To pretend otherwise and try to impose mathematical perfection as the only path to the truth impoverishes the many facets of nature’s beauty and leads, ironically, to a worldview as false and illusory as that depicted on Plato’s cave wall... (MORE - missing details)

RELATED (interview & book): A Tear At The Edge Of Creation
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