Is Beauty Necessary ?

Michio Kaku (/ˈmiːtʃioʊ ˈkɑːkuː/; born 24 January 1947) is an American theoretical physicist, futurist, and popularizer of science. He is a professor of theoretical physics in the City College of New York and CUNY Graduate Center. Kaku has written several books about physics and related topics, has made frequent appearances on radio, television, and film, and writes online blogs and articles. He has written four New York Times best sellers: Physics of the Impossible (2008), Physics of the Future (2011), The Future of the Mind (2014), and The Future of Humanity (2018). Kaku has hosted several TV specials for the BBC, the Discovery Channel, the History Channel, and the Science Channel. Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey Through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the 10th Dimension is the first book-length exploration of the most exciting development in modern physics, the theory of 10-dimensional space. The theory of hyperspace, which Michio Kaku pioneered, may be the leading candidate for the Theory of Everything that Einstein spent the remaining years of his life searching for.

I have started reading this book a fortnight back. Sometimes it is easy to read and sometimes it is difficult. As if Kaku realises this and he infuses some chapters in between highly interesting and magnificently beautiful. This enlivens attraction to read further. “Is Beauty necessary” is a symphony in Physics beginning at the 125^th page.

I wish to preserve this explanation.

Is Beauty necessary ?

I once attended a concert in Boston, where people were visibly moved by the power and intensity of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. After the concert, with the rich melodies still fresh in my mind, I happened to walk past the empty orchestra pit, where I noticed some people staring in wonder at the sheet music left by the musicians.

To the untrained eye, I thought, the musical score of even the most moving musical piece must appear to be a raw mass of unintelligible squiggles, bearing more resemblance to a chaotic jumble of scratches than a beautiful work of art. However, to the ear of a trained musician, this mass of bars, clefs, keys, sharps, flats, and notes comes alive and resonates in the mind. A musician can "hear" beautiful harmonies and rich resonances by simply looking at a musical score. A sheet of music, therefore, is more than just the sum of its lines.

 Similarly, it would be a disservice to define a poem as "a short collection of words organized according to some principle." Not only is the definition sterile, but it is ultimately inaccurate because it fails to take into account the subtle interaction between the poem and the emotions that it evokes in the reader. Poems, because they crystallize and convey the essence of the feelings and images of the author, have a reality much greater than the words printed on a sheet of paper. A few short words of a haiku poem, for example, may transport the reader into a new realm of sensations and feelings.

Like music or art, mathematical equations can have a natural progression and logic that can evoke rare passions in a scientist. Although the lay public considers mathematical equations to be rather opaque, to a scientist an equation is very much like a movement in a larger symphony.

Simplicity. Elegance. These are the qualities that have inspired some of the greatest artists to create their masterpieces, and they are precisely the same qualities that motivate scientists to search for the laws of nature. Like a work of art or a haunting poem, equations have a beauty and rhythm all their own.

Physicist Richard Feynman expressed this when he said,” You can recognize truth by its beauty and simplicity. When you get it right, it is obvious that it is right –  at least if you have any experience - because usually what happens is that more comes out than goes in …. The inexperienced, the crackpots, and people like that, make guesses that are simple, but you can immediately see that they are wrong so that does not count. Others the inexperienced students, make guess that are very complicated and it sort of looks as if it is all right, but I know it is not true because the truth always come out to be simpler, than you thought.”

The French mathematician Henri Poincare expressed it even more frankly when he wrote,"The scientist does not study Nature because it is useful; he studies it because he delights in it, and he delights in it because it is beautiful. If Nature were not beautiful, it would not be worth knowing, and if Nature were not worth knowing, life would not be worth living." In some sense, the equations of physics are like the poems of nature. They are short and are organized according to some principle, and the most beautiful of them convey the hidden symmetries of nature.

For example, Maxwell's equations, we recall, originally consisted of eight equations. These equations are not "beautiful." They do not possess much symmetry. In their original form, they are ugly, but they are the bread and butter of every physicist or engineer who has ever earned a living working with radar, radio, microwaves, lasers, or plasmas. These eight equations are what a tort is to a lawyer or a stethoscope is to a doctor. However, when rewritten using time as the fourth dimension, this rather awkward set of eight equations collapses into a single tensor equation. This is what a physicist calls "beauty," because both criteria are now satisfied. By increasing the number of dimensions, we reveal the true, fourdimensional symmetry of the theory and can now explain vast amounts of experimental data with a single equation.

As we have repeatedly seen, the addition of higher dimensions causes the laws of nature to simplify.

One of the greatest mysteries confronting science today is the explanation of the origin of these symmetries, especially in the subatomic world. When our powerful machines blow apart the nuclei of atoms by slamming them with energies beyond 1 trillion electron volts, we find that the fragments can be arranged according to these symmetries. Something rare and precious is unquestionably happening when we probe down to subatomic distances.

The purpose of science, however, is not to marvel at the elegance of natural laws, but to explain them. The fundamental problem facing subatomic physicists is that, historically, we had no idea of why these symmetries were emerging in our laboratories and our blackboards.

And here is precisely why the Standard Model fails. No matter how successful the theory is, physicists universally believe that it must be replaced by a higher theory. It fails both "tests" for beauty. It neither has a single symmetry group nor describes the subatomic world economically. But more important, the Standard Model does not explain where these symmetries originally came from. They are just spliced together by fiat, without any deeper understanding of their origin.