MIP'NEI TIKKUN HA-OLAM:

Beauty Is Truth (Michio Kaku 10.07.08, Forbes)

The real story concerns the search for beauty and simplicity in physics, the idea that guided Einstein for most of his life. Physicists think that nature, at its most basic level, must be fundamentally gorgeous. At the instant of the Big Bang, they believe, all the forces of the universe were unified into a coherent whole--into a single, mysterious, beautiful superforce. So beauty may ultimately reveal the true secret of creation.

To a physicist, however, beauty is not some squishy, touchy-feely, ephemeral concept. Beauty to a physicist means symmetry, which can be reduced to precise mathematical equations, whether it's the symmetry of a snowflake or starfish, the beauty of a blazing star, the radiance of a diamond or the patterns of sub-atomic particles.

Here's the rub. At the atomic level, everywhere we look, we see only shattered fragments of this master symmetry. Physicists were shocked to discover a whole zoo of sub-atomic particles in their atom smashers. (The father of the atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer, was so frustrated by this deluge of particles that he solemnly proclaimed that the Nobel Prize should go to the physicist who had NOT discovered a new particle that year.)

Light, gravity and nuclear forces seem totally dissimilar. So physicists are like detectives, trying to arrange the shattered pieces together, hunting for clues, trying to recreate the scene of the "crime," for example, the Big Bang.

At the end of the day it's all just a matter of aesthetics.

Posted by Orrin Judd at October 7, 2008 11:40 AM