Truth and Beauty: Aesthetics and Motivations in Science 
by 

Subrahmanijan Chandrasekhar

 

The Aestheticism of Science

Truth and Beauty is a collection of papers and lectures written and delivered over a period of 40 years by the Nobel laureate astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar. The subject is the aesthetics of science in terms both of the motivations of individual scientists and of the global scientific collective as it exists now as well as historically. 

The book confirms at least two aspects of scientific aesthetics that seem to have general, perhaps universal, applicability. First, scientists have a very difficult time assessing their own motivations much less those of their colleagues or scientific forebears. Second, the disciplinary criteria about what constitutes a superior theory or explanation are ex-post rationalisations, much more like advertising slogans than standards for research.

Chandrasekhar makes a good start in his narrative by stating clearly what he’s after. He wants to know what makes scientists tick. What do they and their profession consider a success? Having stated this objective he seems to ignore it and hardly even speculates about what the personal and professional values of scientists might be. He barely touches on the issue in the rest of the book.

The mathematician, G H Hardy, in his Apology of a Mathematician, expressed an acute hesitancy about his writing about mathematics because it wasn’t doing mathematics and added nothing to the discipline. It seemed to him somewhat vulgar, professional gossip perhaps, to subject what mathematicians do to scrutiny from outside the profession. He also feared inappropriate generalisations about his colleagues.

Chandrasekhar shares Hardy’s reticence but much more sharply. He is after all commenting on not just his own discipline of astrophysics, but also on the practice of science from cosmology to quantum biology and everything in between. It’s fair to say, I think, that he is not only fearful of offending his colleagues, but also of appearing a fool to a wide range of other scientists. 

So instead of analysing the possible motivations of scientists by investigating their psyches, he tells rambling stories of some great names - Newton, Boltzmann, Einstein, Eddington and the like. These stories are largely anecdotal, padded with all sorts of irrelevant biographical fluff. When they are more than that, mainly in those involving astrophysics, they document not the aesthetics of those involved but the historical progress of the professional argument, sometimes equation by equation. The confrontation of research criteria with each other is never attempted. Yet this is the essential locus of what he’s meant to be investigating.

Even the anecdotal evidence is unenlightening. Newton’s self assessment of why he did what he did was because he felt “like a boy playing on the sea-shore.” This theme of play is recurrent among many scientists - Michelson and Dirac among them - but it hardly constitutes an aesthetical value. This is the equivalent of the reply of an opera-goer “Because it was cool” to the question “why did you go.” It means nothing to anyone but the speaker. The reader is left wondering what aspect of play is, as it were, in play among these scientists. Once again, no personal motivations are even speculated upon.

Regarding the disciplinary criteria of value for science, Chandrasekhar seems particularly confused at the outset. His first named criterion is epistemological: “The basic concepts of science gain their validity in proportion to the extent of the domain of natural phenomena which can be analysed in terms of them.” This seems to be a common sentiment among many scientists and philosophers of science: if it explains more it is a better theory.

But this epistemological criterion is patently an empty slogan. It all depends on the criterion of what ‘explains’ means. Whatever this criterion is, it is not going to derived from science itself. For example relativity physics and quantum physics are clearly more widely applicable than Newtonian physics. But relativity physics creates the problem of infinite density in black holes and cannot explain mass ejection from these entities. Quantum physics purports to explain the very small, yet in doing so it brings along the paradoxes of quantum entanglement and Schrodinger uncertainty. And relativity physics is inconsistent with quantum physics. So in exactly what way are relativity and quantum physics superior to Newtonian physics? Whatever the answer, it is more than simply epistemological generality.

On the other hand, Chandrasekhar, also posits an explicitly aesthetical criterion for science, one that consists in the “continual and increasing recognition of the uniformity of nature.” Other similar comments about the harmony of parts and wholes are quoted from Francis Bacon in the 16th century onwards. The difficulty of course is that this aesthetical criterion, what the Chinese call Wa, harmonious interaction, is a contrary to the epistemological criteria of explanatory scope. A quantum universe is not something harmonious by anyone’s standards. Einstein hated it as a scientific abomination. Chandrasekhar even admits in his later lectures that an element of surprise, a sort of pleasing discord, has become virtually de riguer in modern scientific theory. One scientist’s harmony seems to be another’s pedestrian triviality.

There is, finally, a difference between a professional criterion of success that is inferred from how science has progressed in the past, and one that is imposed on work done in the present. The first is a rationalisation, a very unscientific generalisation that ignores the twists and turns and dead ends of most of scientistifuc thought. The second is a considered judgment which might be applied to current work on the basis of experience. Chandrasekhar seems to be entirely oblivious to the distinction. He offers not the slightest clue to how ‘good science’ is conducted. He is unwilling to venture anything about the current criterion of success, I think, largely because it is changing all the time. There is no such criterion because the criterion shifts as fast as scientific results. 

One is reminded of Lord Kelvin’s remarks to his physicist colleagues toward the 19th century. At a annual conference his announced confidently that all the fundamental problems of physics had been satisfactorily addressed. What remained were issues of ‘mopping up’ in the discipline. Within only a few years physics was rocked by Einstein and Bohr. Whatever criterion of good science Kelvin had been using, it had nothing to do with that in use a generation later. If Chandrasekhar had the insight to say something like this, he might be interesting. As it is, science emerges from his prose as somewhat tedious and boring.

I understand entirely the difficulty scientists have in detecting their own personal motivations and ingrained professional standards. It is difficult for any of us to articulate why we do what we do or what constitutes a success in doing it. Nonetheless the difficulty of the task is hardly relevant when there seems to be a growing worldwide movement of distrust and dismissal of science as merely self-aggrandising intellect. 

Aestheticism is the term denoting the myopic confirmation of one’s aesthetic prejudices. It is a psychological disorder that involves projecting what one wants to be the case on to the environment at hand. Psychiatrists associate this disorder with forms of anality, the obsessive attention to irrelevant or incidental detail. By this criterion Chandrasekhar‘s presentation is scientific aestheticism. It is a sort of idealisation of what’s in his head, perhaps about why he thinks he should do astrophysics, but certainly not about why he actually does astrophysics. 

Few buy the traditional claims of ‘scientific objectivity’ since such a thing is patently impossible. Scientific aestheticism has substituted for traditional religious beliefs, with about the same degree of irrationality. Idiosyncratic preferences, politics, and lucky mistakes play a much bigger role in scientific advance than, method, professional standards and raw intellect, disinterested or not. What is possible as well as necessary is that scientists, like the rest of us, come out of the aesthetical closet and get serious about who they are and why.