| RAJGOPAL NIDAMBOOR
Science is truth -- a clarion call of civilisation. More so, in today's context
-- the era of miracles,
or wonders, and mass destruction. A case in point: New York
and Washington, September 11, or the daily dose of sombre
violence in Kashmir, a 'Paradise Lost.' They are tragedies
never before incarnate in history.
Aesthetics, in art or science, is no longer a question
of "I do my thing, you do yours," an aphorism quite
incorrectly attributed to Nietzsche. As a matter of fact,
integrating aesthetic judgment with truth, beauty, and justness
is, today, more than absolutely mandatory than ever before.
Not just because the US, or the entire world, has now woken
up to reality, and vowed to annihilate Frankenstein monsters
-- not just OBL, or Osama bin Laden -- that it once created,
or encouraged.
As noted scholar John Broomfield puts
the idea in perspective in his fine book, Other Ways Of
Knowing: "We live in strange times -- amazing and
scary. We are bombarded with bizarre and unfamiliar images,
and the interpretations we are given are contradictory and
confusing." The inference is obvious: of two postulates.
One, promising a bright future; the other, environmental/human
disaster. Not only that. The two paradigms also question the
basic premise of science: the science of beauty, or truth,
and its dangerous implications.
Not that a theory of knowledge that is
merely aesthetic is simply accurate. Far from it. Not only
does such a theory fail to deal with inter-subjective goodness,
it even trashes any objective aspects of any sort of truths.
So, a middle way, as the renowned Buddhist scholar Nagarjuna,
or the Zen Masters, recommend, would be a major proposition
to bringing about a balance in such a structure: of a composition,
where beauty is a sign of truth -- a prospect that does good
for all. Of one, that also attempts, in the process, to include
the moment of truth -- from empiricism to constructivism, from
relativism to aestheticism. In other words, an existential
approach, or a passage, that would release them from their
contradictions, and place them, as it were, into a crystal-clear
rainbow alliance.
It goes without saying that when any new
scientific theory is put forward, scientists wish to know
how close it is to the truth. Forget about opposition to any
new percept. Here's why. Scientists have since long used empirical
data to estimating how close a theory is to the truth, all
right. But, not all theories, however, can be evaluated in
that manner. For a plethora of reasons. In areas such as string
theory, cosmology, and evolutionary biology, for example,
arriving at how close a theory is to truth is next to impossible.
On the contrary, just anybody would be
able to assess how beautiful an object is. The features of
an object are immediately accessible to most of us. It's,
in other words, a basic constituent that is required to scrutinise
the object with aesthetic judgment: one that delivers a conclusive
ruling on its beauty. Not so simple, though. Because, such
a descent may make us wonder whether we'd all use our aesthetic
perception/s, at the proverbial drop of a hat: to ascertain
how imminent a scientific theory is to the truth.
The legendary Roger Penrose summed it
up, quite succinctly: "It is a mysterious thing, in fact,
how something which looks attractive may have a better chance
of being true than something which looks ugly. I have noticed
on many occasions [in my own work] where there might, for
example, be two guesses that could be made as to the solution
of a problem, and in the first case I'd think how nice it
would be if it were true; whereas in the second case I would
not care very much about the result even if it were true.
So often, in fact, it turns out that the more attractive possibility
is the true one."
It's not that all scientific revolution
theories have had a web of aesthetically innovative strokes.
It's not also uncommon for many scientists not to have called
several old and new theories -- when first put forward -- 'ugly.'
A host of astronomers, for instance, regarded Johannes Kepler's
theory of planetary motions as unattractive. Because, Kepler's
'blueprint' portrayed planetary orbits as ellipses -- not a
combination of circles. Isaac Newton's theory of gravity was
disliked by many of his contemporaries as being aesthetically
unacceptable -- for postulating action at a distance. In recent
times, quantum electrodynamics was regarded as repulsive for
relying on non-standard mathematical operations for re-normalisation.
The list is endless. But, one crucial fact remains: just as
these groundbreaking theories built up their impressive track
record, they all came gradually to be declared as aesthetically
appealing. As Francis Bacon exemplified: "There is no
excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion."
To look at it all, differently -- or, perceptively.
It maybe surmised that physicists aren't the only scientific
group to have been guided by their sense of beauty in developing
new theories. They have learnt, to their primal advantage,
how to anticipate the beauty of nature at its most fundamental
level. Just like geneticists, for example. To cull a paradigm:
when Rosalind Franklin "learned" of Francis Crick and James
D Watson's model of the structure of the DNA, she "accepted
the fact that the structure was too pretty not to be true."
It's a fundamental statement that presupposed that beauty
was, indeed, an indicator of truth in scientific theories.
Hence, you may well ask: what is the evidence for this proposition?
Most scientists distinguish objective
properties of theories from the subjective sense of beauty
in contemplating a theory. However, not all scientists agree
over what aesthetic properties a theory must possess to influence
as cute. But, one thing is clear: they often acquiesce to
beauty in theories that encompass simple mathematical equations,
the splendour of truth and beauty of the Universe, symmetries
of nature, a ravishing model's Basic Face etc., In other words,
it filters to a notable construct, a fundamental, or scientific,
variant that explains why scientists are engaged -- albeit
unwittingly, or partly unconsciously -- in a systematic, inductive
[re]search for aesthetic properties that constitute the portent
that beauty is truth, although they are just as much concerned
about the wonders of technological advance falling into sinister
hands.
There hangs a tale -- a saga of what we
have come to, thanks to [a] scientific paradox. It's a paradox
that's sure going to haunt each one of us -- and, future generations
-- for a long, long time to come.
|
