When the Beauty of Research Becomes more Important than its Findings: An Aesthetic Framework of Scientific Inquiry as an Extension of Dirac’s Beauty Principle

Abstract

The contemporary wave of commodification of scientific knowledge and the ongoing trend of rendering the working culture in natural sciences ever more entrepreneurial have taken an immense toll on the popularity of disciplines that explore natural sciences through the prism of arts and humanities. One of such disciplines has been the history of exact sciences, the study of which bears an extraordinary importance for ensuring the harmonious future developments in this sphere of knowledge.

In this article I hark back to the history of a principle proposed by the English physicist, Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac, in 1963, and turn it into a heuristic for directing the growth of scientific knowledge in a previously unexplored and, to most, unforeseen direction. In a Scientific American article from 1963, Dirac, who had been rewarded for his contribution to the atomic theory and success in reconciling general relativity with quantum mechanics with the Nobel Prize in physics thirty years earlier, asserted that “it is more important to have beauty in one’s equations than to have them fit experiment”.

This statement of his came to be known colloquially as Dirac’s beauty principle. To Dirac, however, who had nil inclinations toward art and who openly disparaged parallel studies of poetry and physics, the term “beauty” meant something more prosaic than what it would mean to a person with an aesthetic sensibility, in which sense it can be argued to have represented an ill choice of the word, causing confusion in later attempts to interpret this controversial statement.

A more radical aspect of this principle is that it puts more weight on the “beauty” of human models of reality than on their concordance with the empirical findings and facts, which most positivists would find to be absurd.

Despite the empirical quixotism of Dirac’s principle, here I propose, after following a line of thought rooted in personal reflection, the thesis that extending this principle to scientific concepts in general, ranging from hypotheses and methods to forms of expression, could lead to a radically new scientific worldview: one in which the beauty of research concepts is perceived as more important than the solidity of their experimental backing.

Proliferation of this worldview, where creative ideas and forms and valued more than their proofs, may halt the ongoing progression of the natural sciences culture toward ever more entrepreneurial, industrial and impersonal grounds and restore its romanticist roots that extend deep into the fields of philosophy, sociology, arts and humanities.