Gell-Mann on Beauty and Truth in Physics

At TED talks:

Wielding laypeople's terms and a sense of humor, Nobel Prize winner Murray Gell-Mann drops some knowledge about particle physics, asking questions like, Are elegant equations more likely to be right than inelegant ones? Can the fundamental law, the so-called "theory of everything," really explain everything? His answers will surprise you.

Comments

[Winfield J. Abbe]

It is possible to reconstruct Maxwell's equations in a completely elegant and symmetric form; e.g., the divergence of E is proportional to the electric charge density and the divergence of B is proportional to the magnetic charge density, etc. Unfortunately, nature has never provided any experimental evidence that magnetic monopoles exist; hence, divergence of B is zero.
This is the real beauty of physics; nature makes the choice, not man. Man is prejudiced, nature is not. Often man clings to theories long after they have long been demolished with facts and experiments. For example, when quarks were first proposed back in the 1960's no one believed in them because no particle with fractional charge had ever been observed (Millikan Oil Drop Experiment about 1909) and these particles themselves had not been observed. Even today, while some claim to have observed certain quarks, they have not been observed in isolation and in order to reproduce the results one would have to have access to a multi billion dollar facility, which most people do not have access to. Also, still, no particles have been observed with fractional charge to this day, 2007. In other fields, like cancer, prejudiced scientists cling to the theory that cancer is caused by mutated genes when experiments and facts, developed decades ago, prove that cancer is caused by the wrong energy; oxygen deficiency or fermentation. This explains why the war on cancer is a total failure and about one person dies every minute either from cancer, "treatment" or both.

[Abbas Raza]

I enjoyed this talk very much. Thanks, Robin. (I had tried to express some similar thoughts in my essay on Francis Crick.)

[D]

As a lowly experimentalist, I have to say we're rather more skeptical about this beauty gig than the theorists tend to be:

1. Yes, sure there are beautiful theories that are true, but the history of physics is also littered with the corpses of beautiful theories slain by ugly facts. Technicolor was a beautiful idea taken seriously by many; it is also wrong (or at least it would be very unnatural in the technical sense for it to turn out to be right after all).

2. More often, theories are beaufiful, but not perfectly so. The most famous example of course is the very equations of electromagnetism Gell-Mann showed, which would be positively lovely if there were magnetic monopoles, but there aren't any.

3. There are beautiful mathematical ideas that happen not to be physical - my undergraduate adviser used to say 'the theorists have beautifully predicted fifteen of the past two experimental discoveries'.

4. For that matter, there would be nothing ugly about planetary orbits being circles and not ellipses. It would even be simpler, I think. That’s just not the way it is.

5. Theories can indeed be ugly while still being true – while quantum field theory is indeed elegant, the standard model of particle physics is not particularly pretty. Indeed, some string theorists these days have taken to calling it a ‘Rube Goldberg contraption’

6. It is useful to remember that Einstein himself made his greatest mistake (not taking Quantum Mechanics seriously enough) by appealing to a misguided notion of simplicity and elegance.

7. Most people, even Gell-Mann, aren’t Einstein or Newton.