The Truth About Beauty in Physics
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- Опубликовано: 7 сен 2020
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The great physicist Hermann Weyl once said: "My work always tried to unite the true with the beautiful, but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful." But is this actually good advice for doing physics?
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2:41 I've seen many pictures of Einstein... but never him lounging shirtless on a lawn chair. Kudos.
So we should give preference to the beauty on this one?
@@edwardofgreene um, yes as it shows hes but a man. A man like you or I could be. Lets strive for that honour 🙂
that made me giggle
All he needed was a Budweiser in hand to be a true american
He is the beauty of physics
I feel bad for the Universe, being held to such unrealistic standards of beauty. Perfect orbits tend to be photoshopped, anyway.
#toxicPhysics #UniverseShaming
Well if the universe would just stop consuming more dark energy than it burns off, it wouldnt be expanding constantly.
It the universe's own fault for being a fatty.
@@bipolarminddroppings I mean damn, going from being the size of a grain of rice to millions of kilometers in just 10^-15 seconds, you know something's wrong when you get so fat that quickly
Loooool
@@fedem8229 aint that the truth. But you know, its not politically correct so we better watch out, we might get cancelled.
I believe the intuition that is usually right isn't the one that goes "this feels right" but more often the one that goes "something is off"
For example: You don't need to be an expert sculptor or an architect to know when there's an issue with a structure
You don't need to be an English professor to know when there's something wrong with a sentence
When you're an expert, you can tell what's wrong, where it is, how/why it's wrong and the possible solutions
Intuition leads you to flat earth, beware!
@@LuisAldamiz Intuition - if you then shut of your brain and never even attempt to think about it (or you gotta be as dishonest as the flatards)
@@LuisAldamiz Do not confuse intuition with ignorance.
You don't need a lifeguard to tell you you're drowning.
Can we give some mad props to the animators of this show?
Production quality of this is absolutely off the chain. How they can do this every week is beyond me.
Don't read my username
@@hydrogenatom4624 No one is even interested LOL!
@@informationparadox387 :(
@@hydrogenatom4624 You just lost the game
@@hydrogenatom4624 Don't Read My Profile Picture replied: "Joey Crowley I may have lost the game, but I will win the battle."
55 minutes ago
.
I saw that.
And indeed, you have won the battle, but I will win the war.
I think Richard Feynman said it best
"It doesn't matter how smart you are,
It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is,
If it doesn't match up with observation and experiment...
It's wrong"
Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman!
Science it's not that simple. Sometimes scientists ignore anomalies on their theories that contradict experimental data and continue working with their research programmes.
@@gustavodeoliveira702 That doesn't make them right.
Of course sometimes anomalies are just that - anomalies. Failed detections or miscalibrations or whatnot. Unfortunately us humans tend to bias ourselves to being "correct" so its pretty easy to assume a measurement error when in fact its a theoretical error. That's why we insist on things like peer review and repeatable experiments (and even then some things get through.)
String theory (and Loop Quantum Gravity and any other TOE) are kind of special candies though in that we _can't_ test them via experiment. Not due to any hubris or lack of cleverness but because TOE energy levels are just fundamentally way, way, way beyond our capabilities. How does one match up theory to observation when observation is impossible? We either have to deem all TOEs immediately wrong (because they don't match up with observation due to not being any observations,) but that would kind of just stop subatomic science all together. Or we can rely entirely on peer review and try to push through anyway, with only our pursuit of "beauty" to really guide us. Yes, it _could_ be a trap.. but when you only have one path to follow you're kind of stuck dealing with that possibility when you get to it.
That's bad news for string theory.
@@sasshole8121 The only real good news for string theory is that all of its competitors have the exact same problem. Until we can actually test a prediction, all TOEs are really just exercises in mathematics.
I believe it was Asimov who said that most scientific discoveries begin "That's funny!" (meaning current understanding doesn't predict it) rather than "Eureka!"
They start with that's funny and you shout eureka when you finally finish the math you have to do
The fact that adding epicycles upon epicycles can represent any motion is *literally* true by Fourier theory :)
Yes! Hearing him say that made me immediately recall learning about fourier series in intermediate physics class!
Still a function is prettier than its Fourier representation
@@BartoszChmura if you used infinite terms in the fourier, both would be absolutely equivalent
I immediately thought of Fourier Series when I saw the animation of circles.
Which means you could form a theory that describes the movement of planets _perfectly_ ... and yet predicts nothing.
I will refer to particle colliders as "summoning circles" from now on...
OMG yes.
With this circle we shall summon forth a force (carrier) the likes of which humans have never seen before!
ILLUMINATI CONFIRMED!!!
16:37 - The best evil "Bwa ha ha" of all time.
16:20 for the comment about summoning circles. (;
*Sabine Hossenfelder has entered the chat*
beat me to it
Now - there's a cage match I'd pay to watch.
@@rog2224 she was on a livestream panel that Matt hosted recently. Eric Weinstein was on too and she did pretty much roast him
@@justdave9610 Ooh, do you have a link?
She did. It's on the channel.
We tend to be a little careless with Occam's Razor, and on more than one occasion we've nicked the face of physics with it.
Absolutely! I've always had a problem with how it is interpreted and invoked. I believe it's suppose to simply refer to the idea of trying to break something down to it's simplest explanation. Nothing more.
How I apply it, if two explanatory models have equal outcomes, use the one which makes the least assumptions. I see it more as a pragmatic guideline. Why use a more complicated expiation when a simple one will do?
That of course does not mean one can not explore other alternatives. Especially when you do know that something is off with the theory you are applying.
I agree. One example of occam's razor fallacy is with flat earth. An argument for flat earth may present multiple pieces of "evidence", such as mirages, cherry-picked experiments, and other conspiracies. While each of these can be clearly refuted, one may use occam's razor to say: "What's more likely: that all of these are because the earth is flat, or that they each have a different explanation?" As a mental model, it often doesn't work in real life where the simplest explanations often aren't the correct ones.
@@1.4142 good point
@@1.4142 Though what you're doing there is disregarding observed phenomena which the contradicts a flat earth model. Yes. You could explain all those alternatives away. But then you start making a lot of assumptions. So are all the discrepancies of your theory of a flat earth due to elaborate conspiracies, complicated physical behaviour, and odd circumstances. Or is a spherical earth model actually simpler as do away with all those special cases you have to account for in your flat earth model?
I've always preferred the translation of the razor as - "It is vain to do with more what can be done with less". Which is itself a elegantly parsimonious expression than embodies the idea perfectly.
The razor is a guideline, not a hard rule: it just means that when two models are equally good at explaining something, the simpler one should be favored. But when the more complex one is objectively better, then Occam does not apply, what applies is the principle of "when everything else has been deemed impossible, what remains, however unlikely it may seem, is the truth".
"Simpler" and "Better" are also words impossible to define.
@@ObjectsInMotion - Much easier to define (within context) than beauty, which is always in the eye of the beholder.
@@LuisAldamiz Is it though?
If I'm in a situation where some money disappears from a safe, and two people come up offering an explanation. One says he saw someone wheel in an x-ray machine, scan the safe, used an arc torch to cut a hole in the safe, took the money, cast an identical copy of the door to the safe, and meticulously spent an hour reattaching the door and make off all without anyone noticing, and the other person says he saw a wizard do it. Which explanation is more simple?
This is an open problem with Occam's Razor, and many philosopher's have attempted an explanation, none of which entirely satisfactory. Basically, "assumption tallying" is arbitrary, as well as acceptable levels of unobserved possibilities.
*an elegantly...
My romantic notions of physics being beautiful were washed away the first time I saw the full equations for the standard model.
Now all I care about is if it works, if it happens to be beautiful too, awesome.
Whats an example of something like what you were expecting it to look like? 1=♾?
A lot of the beauty is in how you mask it with nice fancy notation.
Example: einstein field equation
Beautiful with the correct notation, literally vomit inducing without
@@thereasonabletroll68 true that, same could be said about the standard model though, without the tensor notation and using lagrangians , I shudder to think what it would look like
I've been intrigued by C. Furey's videos on abstract algebras on hyper complex numbers producing a structure much like the standard model.
lol the pic of shirtless Einstein made me laugh out loud. 2:43
What a DADDY
How have I never seen that picture before!
wr
9:45 Some would say there’s a beauty in the Wilhelm Scream. We’ve gotten a lot more out of it than we put in.
It's a legendary soundwave pattern ;)
I love all the comments about Sabine
Me too!
Sabine Hossenfelder wrote a very interesting book on this topic!
Don't read my username
Both you and Sabine make good points. Good thing Dirac didn't give up when he was looking at that awful mess. I guess I'd think of mathematical elegance as a strategy not a requirement for a theory.
"Let x = x"
The most beautiful & elegant equation of all. If you could understand that one, you would already know what to do next.
And it's also a beautiful song.
@@wcsxwcsx Congratulations, we have a winner! It Tango, you might even say. I think the point of that one was to point out just how far it can go, and what you may find at the end of it: reality is essentially a tautology, as Douglas Adams put it. If you get Laurie, you may appreciate the magic of emergence in other ways.
The point is not so much to cut it up, as it is to go out and meet it, because it was already there. Reality emerges from itself, and if you can catch it doing that, you can find keys to... well, not just the right answers, but also the right questions.
You may enjoy a couple of Douglas's presentations here on RUclips:
"Douglas Adams An Artificial God"
and
"Douglas Adams: Parrots the Universe and Everything"
Thank you for playing along! Perhaps despite being "Born, Never Asked" you are also free... so have fun out there :)
Weird that we mention the 4 "beautiful" Maxwell's equations without talking about the fact that someone else had to simplify them from 20 to 4 using vector formalism. Not to forget that his personal explanations of how the formulas describe reality were stunningly convoluted (to put it nicely). This would have shown that the "reduction" of formulas is also somewhat "subjective" depending on the underlying formalism you are willing use, just like Einstein's equations...
Oliver Heaviside does not get enough credit
oliver heaviside!!
As long as the Space Time t-shirts remain beautiful, I won't argue.
Don't read my username
Me 5 mins into the vid: HES BACK IN SPACE
Back in SpaceTime :)
he needs a cl4p-tp mascot because *SPAAAACE!*
@@111455 cl4p-tp? You are confusing cl4p-trap from borderlands with whitley from portal my dude
@@pressaltf4forfreevbucks179 i thought i remembered cl4p-trap saying that line in the commercials when the pre-sequel game was released by your idea is even better!
Whitley: SPAAAAAAAAACE!
By modifying my assumptions about what I would learn from this episode, I was able to think of the perfect halloween costume: Dirac-ula.
2:42 Sick Einstein pic! I don't think I've ever seen it! Thanks!
That circles inside circles thing reminded me of Fourier series
Even what is beautifully can have ugly bumps and smooth rocks It’s all in the cookie recipient.
They are the same thing.
2:41 "Hey! cool T-Shirt man"
Yes, love it! those it have a meaning?
Haha it's just a fun thought i had how Einstein would react on seeing Matt's space time T-Shirt
Episode made specifically for Sabine
MyTBrain max is shaking his head rn
lmao
i rarely watch her video. which one does it answer for?
Matt wants his own music video response.
Rizky Adiyanto Her book “Lost In Math”
I feel like Matt Parker in his last video explained it well. Any math that looks pretty just means we hid the ugly someplace else.
pi and the perimeter of an ellipse/circle?
Having come here from there, I've been left wondering whether bundling an infinite series into a single constant is beautiful or ugly... Is an infinite series inherently ugly? Having quickly taken a look around, I kind of like the Leibniz formula for pi. Speaking as a non-mathematician, mind.
Einstein: draw me like one of your French girls.
2:42 it’s interesting how he chose this particular and random photo of Einstein shirtless.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I wonder what kinds of notions of symmetry a fiddler crab civilization would come up with.
The bigger the pincer the more beautiful it is, obviously. Super-pincer therory FTW!
Any sufficiently advanced civilization would eventually stumble upon group theory, which gives a concrete and objective way of studying symmetries. So we would probably all agree
@@LuisAldamiz wrr, and symx or not doesn tmatter
Solipsistic, post-modern trash. People's brains are a product of a collection of genetic and bio-electric states, and as a result our perceptions are governed by the same cold, hard laws of physics everything else is. "Beauty" is nothing more than the ability to accept a reality that exists independent of us in the manner preferred by our emotionally driven brains. Any difference of opinion, and by extension opinion itself, is illusory, just as causal as anything else.
The right and wrong answer exists independent of the observer, and whatever flaws they may possess.
The human mind doesn't run on unicorn farts and pixie dust, regardless of how much people wish to believe we're somehow magical in nature.
Good to see that PBS was able to discuss philosophy in physics, really pleasant going in subjective topics like this, thank you very much.
It seems like people often misinterpret what physicists and mathematicians mean by "mathematical beauty". It's not so much about "looking nice" as it is about explaining a lot of complexity with very few rules. In other words (edit: as Matt explains around 4:47) it's like Occam's razor: If you have to make many assumptions in order to explain some set of observations, it's less likely to be correct than if you can explain the same observations with fewer or simpler assumptions. In this case "fewer/simpler mathematical rules" and "fewer assumptions" are essentially synonymous.
Also, mathematical beauty can mean tying together various disparate theories under a single framework. Some famous examples in theoretical physics are electroweak unification, which gives a single formula to explain both electromagnetism and the weak force (later also unified with the strong force in the Georgi-Glashow theory and others), and the 5 theories of string theory being tied together by M-theory. Even if string theory turns out to be wrong, it is an amazing testament to the power of mathematical beauty.
Edit #2: See Sabine's response below. I trust that she knows what she's talking about and that the interviews she's conducted have been more illuminating than my experiences. Take my comment with a grain of salt, though I think there is still a debate to be had.
Occam's razor has led many to their deaths!
Beauty is a person's comparison of reality vis a vis; an idealised abstraction of reality. Go deeper you troglodyte.
You are accounting for one interpretation. Certainly symmetry plays an important roll as well - as the video explained.
"it is about explaining a lot of complexity with very few rules"
No, it is not. I literally wrote a book* about this for which I interviewed a lot of people. Explaining a lot of complexity with very few rules is a good, scientific criterion. This is definitely *not* the notion of beauty that physicists currently use in the foundations of physics.
* www.amazon.com/Lost-Math-Beauty-Physics-Astray/dp/0465094252
So basically. Humans are lazy and are desperate to shoehorn that laziness into truth even when faced with piles of evidence that that does nothing but lead you further away from truth.
someone's been watching sabine hossenfelder
I see you are a man of culture.
El Torco what, you mean that noted singer?
love that woman, so smart and pretty
She was on their second "theory of everything" live stream a few weeks ago, so probably.
@@ReptilianLepton , It was a joke, Sabine also makes music and has many music videos on the physics channel and on her second channel.
beauty and chaos are the same thing just with the magnifying glass at different settings.
Wow. Never thought about it this way
The lack of beauty in higher physics made me switch to math for my Phd after I did my Master in physics I still remember having to lern the Bethe-Weizsäcker formula for same exam 🤯
The simplest and most elegant explanation for all the laws of physics:
THIS IS A DREAM
Good comment. Why you are screaming in CAPS?
Finding beauty in physics is like finding the perfect cup of wine. When you solve that equation perfectly, you get the feeling....
WELL SAID MY BROTHER
id rather get a joint lol
David or a Synthesizer (Modular//Eurorack and keyboard)
What about the perfect soft drink? You can find beauty in physics without such pretentiousness.
@@David-qv9yy Think of breeding that just perfect strain that was meant for the world. Like you call your mom about it.
"The ideals that have lighted my way, and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Kindness, Beauty, and Truth." --Albert Einstein
I personally would put it like this: when you discover that two phenomena are actually two sides of the same medal, you are grouping them together reducing the actors into play. This process leads you to less variables and shorter equations that explain a wider range of observations.
Despite the GR is more complex than the Newtonian gravitational law, it is more "dense of explanations"
Matt glanced a bit over it, but stacking circular motion on top of circular motion can give you any movement pattern you like down to arbitrary precision. Today, we call this Fourier transformation.
Beauty should never be the guiding force. It is only good as a confirmation, after it is proven to be good.
As an engineer, I often have to go through several ugly and complicated solutions, until I get to the end result, which is simple and beautiful. If I skip those, because they are “ugly”, I would never find the correct solution. Beauty can only be evaluated in retrospect. A more beautiful theory is easier to teach, to use, and to build upon.
Also, quite often, only the very best solution is beautiful. The second best solution is ugly, and complicated. But the second best is still useful and good enough. For example (assuming it doesn’t fail) the string theory might be an ugly and complicated theory, which describes the universe better than both relativity and quantum physics. And the theory one step beyond the string theory will be simple and beautiful. And we cannot skip the ugly one we have to work ourselves through it.
The problem we're having is kind of the opposite though. String theory is generally considered reasonably "beautiful" by physicists. But we can't test string theory. We can't test any of string theory's competitors either. That leave us with our only guiding principles being:
a) QM and GR don't play nice together, so we know physics isn't "done."
b) "Beauty" just because its worked in the past and we don't really have anything else.
Physicists generally think of beauty in terms of two things: symmetries (more symmetric = more beautiful) and free parameters (fewer = more beautiful.) And string theory does great on both those measures. Yes, actually doing _calculations_ (ie: what engineers tend to focus on) can be horribly complicated and ugly, but from the theoretical side string theory is pretty good. (Of course its one free parameter is itself extremely ugly -- that's the infamous 10^500 possibilities parameter that everyone mocks.. so string theory certainly isn't _perfectly_ beautiful. But its pretty good.)
Of course that said, we shouldn't be blinded by the beauty. String theory does quite rightly get scorned for taking up too much of the public eye for too long. That's not to say its bad or even wrong, but until we can actually test something and get real world observations to guide us, its worth exploring other options as well, if for no other reason than to rule them out.
As an ex-PhD student who sketches a lot, I go through a lot of construction lines and vague blobby messes before I converge on something that actually has a proper form and is (to me, at least) satisfying
But...
I also think that people are capable of finding some kind of direction in beauty.
For example, I think that the great artists through history knew they had conceived something beautiful even before they had the paper in front of them.
Perhaps they do this from the outset, or perhaps they actually are simply able to iterate through all the bad ideas in their head more adeptly, and/or simply don't disclose the "ugly" versions.
As such, maybe beauty is more useful when you are working on a problem where the solution is not such a stretch of the imagination.
I'm pretty ignorant regarding string theory, but the problem does seem like the kind of thing that could simply be too complicated for a single brain to iterate through on normal human time scales, which I think would make concepts of "beauty" irrelevant until we work through all the ugly and to the end. That is, beauty will only be useful as a tool once the problem has been solved to "within the limits of our imagination." The problem is until we actually reach the solution, we don't know whether the solution is within the vague notion of "everything I can imagine".
So thanks for your comment, which brought my comment within the limit of my imagination.
That's not to say your comment is ugly and mine beautiful, though! 😅
But you got my brain 99% of the way here.
Saw Matt in recent episode of How the Universe Works! Well done Matt
I've been excited about its latest season, but I had no idea he was in it :D
I have to go watch right now!
One of the reasons that keeps a person glued to your videos is that 'The topics discussed, although being of interest to the viewer & available on other videos as well, its ur methodology of presentation & language👈👍🏼- an epitome of complexity, which arouses a sense of wonder & makes the whole concept that much more mysterious & awe inspiring.
Dude... this is one of my favorite episodes ever. I've had that sense of beauty (elegance) when working through physics / math problems myself. Very interesting to see how it played such a large role with the Greats!
Intuition is useful as long as you apply scientific rigor between intuitive leaps.
Yeah, that feels right.
2:41 never saw THAT einstein pic before
Not Physics related, but relating to the concept of beauty and its hard to define origins, I recommend the book "The Aesthetic Brain: How We Evolved to Desire Beauty and Enjoy Art" by Anjan Chatterjee. I found it a really interesting read.
Truth is beauty...and beauty is truth...sir!
Like much else in physics, beauty is relative.
Perfect thing to watch during lunch
Another amazing video from my favorite YT channel. Thank you!
I love that you're getting into philosophy of science - it's endlessly fascinating - and quite important, as these issues of "is 'beauty' leading us astray?" - "what's with the state of fundamental physics?" - and the lively discussions on your channel show.
It might be interesting to note that there are quite elaborate research-programs in the epistemology and meta-theory of science - especially on issues like "what can we take science to actually tell us about the world?" - "what is evidence and what can it tell us about theories? Is Verification possible? Is Falsification possible? What are the problems with each? Is observation objective - or theory-laden?" - "how do empirical adequacy, parsimony and coherence interrelate to give explanatory power and epistemic probability to an account?". Also more specific questions like "What are the evaluation-criteria for interpretations of quantum-mechanics? - How do notions of probability work in them and are they coherent?", "What constraints are there of the ontology of theories of quantum gravity?" and so on.
Programs like the structuralist meta-theory of empirical sciences by Suppes, Sneed, Suppe, Stegmüller, Moulines, Balzer et al. used set-theory, model-theory and propositional logic to describe the relation between theories and models - and to describe theory-change and inter-theoretic reduction. Other research-programs research the application of Bayesian Belief Revision theory to meta-theory of empirical sciences (science is widely held to proceed by abductive inference to the best explanation, which can be explicated in Bayesian terms - and thus, things like revising belief-networks based on new data can be modeled formally - this in turn can be applied to gain insights into how scientific accounts of phenomena change over time) - other programs research complexity-theoretical approaches (Schmidhuber, Hutter et al. - incidentally, Schmidhuber's lab was also the birthplace of LSTMs, for all you computational neuroscience nerds out there)
Fascinating stuff - in general, it's well worth researching whether the tools of science can help us understand foundational and meta-level issues - and thankfully, there is lively and productive interdepartmental research between philosophers of science, mathematicians, computer scientists, physicists and behavioral scientists on these issues ... unfortunately, a lot of foundational research still gets defunded.
Foundational issues - epistemic, methodological and ontological questions are important. The best physicists and mathematicians knew this as well - Descartes, Newton, Leibnitz, Helmholtz, Mach, Poincaré, Duhem, Einstein, Heisenberg, Planck, Schrödinger, Dirac, Weyl ... they were all thinking hard about such issues, and as methodical as they could.
Like the video itself your comment is deeply intriguing and thoughtful. Having almost completed Prof Arthur Holmes online course A History of Philosophy, I was thrilled to actually know in detail about the people you listed. Fascinating stuff! Thanks for taking the time.
Nice reference to the 2nd podcast on the theories of everything! I was so mind blown with that episode, and still trying to sort my thoughts after it.
I was hoping for a mention of "truth/beauty" as the "alternative" names for the Top/Bottom quarks.
I'm still confused as to how those were dropped, but we kept Strange/Charm instead of renaming them "sideways/centre" 😜
About beauty. In art (music, painting) there has been a trend toward ever high levels of dissonance being appreciated as beautiful. Proust argued that it was the primary role of the artist to train a new audience to appreciate a new kind of beauty.
Perhaps the same is true for math? Perhaps future physicists will appreciate a different style of elegance.
As a student in Art History, I find this topic very interesting. The idea of beauty is in part inherent to our culture. The Renaissance period played a big role on how Occidental perceive beauty (and what it 'should be') , and symmetry was a big part of it. It would be interesting to do some research to find out other standards of beauty in other cultures. Cause yes, while completely subjective, our sense of beauty can lead us to solutions that help our mind to get toward the idea of what reality (objectivity) could be. But being stuck in one conception of beauty won't help much. I love the conclusion you did on your essay!
One of the most articulate, informational and nice channel (and person) on the tube :)
Oh, yes, and Baumgartner painting restoration too :)
Maybe, a "beauty" formula means "easy to memorise" :D
The idea of "beauty" comes from Plato and the Pithagoreans and it's all kinds of wrong. Truth is what matters, beautiful or ugly.
@@LuisAldamiz Well, next to the philosophical true as in "really true", there is the practical notion of "true enough and very usable". Like we know, that a pendulum is actually not really a sine curve. But it's so close to it, that many people even believe it is really it. For most parts, having found an equation that is extremely useful is a major discovery, even it is not "true-true".
Even in stuff, we already know better what is "true-true" people discovering useful concepts how to tacle it better is a step forward. Like Ramanujans awesome approximation formulas for the ellipse parameter.
@@georgelionon9050 - Fair enough but how does that change anything? Technologically "true" (i.e. good enough to work) is not the same as scientifically true (i.e. as close to truth as humanly possible), and we know that it's science which ultimately drives technology and not the other way around.
@@LuisAldamiz Technology also drives since. Better equipment gives you more information which may help find new ideas about what's going on. Also better technology drives economy. And with better economy there is more time and funds for science. Also telling that something is "as close to truth as humanly possible" is not very clear because we don't know what is humanly possible. Well we can probably say what is humanly possible NOW, but in total we don't have any idea.
As for "accuracy > beauty" I would go with what Matt said - they are both important. For example in econometry you can get more accurate model when you put more variables to it. But often throwing away part of those variables doesn't change much the predictive power of your model and makes it simpler - in these meaning more beautiful. And it doesn't always mean it's bad for accuracy. Sometimes it may actually be more accurate! Because you build your model on some data which are random variables. And the fact that some variables seem to have some predictive power is often simple coincidence. And when you get new data you discover that they don't really matter - it was just specific of your data. Your more complex model was overfitted to those data. And in valuation of model your more complex and more accurate model has less predictive power on new data then the one with fewer but really important variables. Those other, insignificant variables become trash that kills it's predictive power.
Then it's no different from "simple", by that interpretation
Sabine Hossenfelder, Lee Smolin and Peter Woit gave that video a thumbs up.
13:45 such an excellent question and answer! Touched on both the explanation of the light being re emitted at several wavelengths as the electrons do smaller jumps back down, and also the fact that even if the light is perfectly re emitted at the original absorbed wavelength, you'll see less of it since it's scattered in different directions more than other wavelengths going through that cloud or obstacle.
The universe is elegant and beautiful in it's simplicity and complexity. Each layer of beauty revealed by elegant theories and once we understand that layer to an extent, there is another layer ready to be discovered. It is amazing and awesome!
Is it inconceivable to think that since Nature tends to “settle into” a “lowest energy state” (such as attractors and the slowing down of a swinging pendulum) that mathematical descriptions of natural phenomena should also tend to do the same thing (like what Einstein said about making things as simple as possible, but not any simpler)?
The last formula in the universe will be "e".
Less complicated things might simply be more likely to occur.
Interesting side note of history: Kepler felt into his own "beauty trap" when he found some coincidences in the ratios of the different radii of the planets. He spent years of his life to prove that the mathematical foundations of the solar system lies within the "hidden beauty" of the proportions of the five platonic solids (tetrahedron, cube, octahedron etc.)
Matt! This is one of the best video lessons you ever taught. It’s excellent!
WHOA NOW THIS IS INTERESTING
Upon first thought, one would say that our sense of beauty is simply the way it is due to our evolutionary history.
But then, why would evolution result in a sense of beauty that, when applied to mathematics, just so happens to be extremely useful in describing/understanding the nature of reality, at a level far removed from the lives of our ancestors.
This is also surprising because of the fact that, as mentioned, it's not just our sense of beauty that's employed to describe reality, but beauty applied to mathematics. Yet there doesn't seem to be a reason why our mathematical intuitions and our sense of beauty - two seemingly quite distinct features of an organism - would end up evolving 'in parallel' in such a manner so as to converge at a brain that's pretty good at describing reality.
So, is there something more to the nature of evolution and its place in physical reality - and in particular - the evolution of brain-like stuff.
I'm not saying that our brain and psychology isn't entirely the product of our evolutionary history, but is there a framework from which evolution can be viewed which makes the powers of physicists make more sense?
(I don't know how/if consciousness comes into this picture.)
P.S. This might all be BS
Or beauty is simply intrinsic to existence. Why make it complex and messy and explain it as something only the human brain creates in a mental dimension somehow encapsulated in the universe in order to achieve... What exactly?
It's much more elegant to see that "the universe is inherently beautiful". =)
Speaking of beauty, can you please tell me where all the music on the show comes from?
I really have to compliment you on the quality of the presentation. Who ever composed the moving starscape in the background, the sound of motion while shifting focus, and the lighting that placed you in the foreground created a much better presence than earlier videos. To the point where my 4K monitor was fully engaged and portrayed you as a live stream, not a flat recorded video. Kudos to your videographer, that one is a keeper. Use that one again. Pardon me while I re-watch the video. :)
Hey Matt 👋 just wanted to see if you're doing okay. I feel like we take for granted how much effort you and the space time crew put into these beautiful episodes. Thank you all for giving your viewers the gift of knowledge in such a lovely package. I hope you all are safe, eating well and sleeping enough. Love you all 💖🥰
Beauty is inherent in the object, firstly, and then it enters in the eye of the beholder. It's strange to me that modernists fight so strongly against this this simple cause and effect.
Elaborate
@@nofanealbni He probably means what he sees as beauty is beauty for everyone.
I always found solid mathematics something you had to actively try to pretty up, more often cold hard truth not something beautiful itself.
Thankyou Glad your trip was great.
These video are like bed time story as a child..i dont understand a single thing..but it help me going to sleep knowing that some peoples are working hard for my lack of understanding. Thanks you.
This seems like it was made in response to last month's livestream
definitely
“Beauty” in the form of ‘symmetry’ is obviously a useful guide as it will reduce the entropy of one’s theory, which in-turn generalized the theory and provides the ability to do more work.
However this is entirely contingent on the theory’s context. It is either stand-alone, or it is embedded in a larger theory, or it is adjacent to another. So depending on the case, further symmetrizing one’s theory might further remove it from associated theories. Likewise, if you are trying to tie two theories together, and one is accepted but incomplete (as all theories must be) then the interface of connectivity will be an awkward one, until they can be reformed with respect to one another’s associated domain of application.
Additionally, all this says nothing about ‘how the world works’ per say, but instead speaks only of means to produce information conserving (nothing but the axioms and boundary conditions) models of our world.
Currently we have lots of theories beautiful in their own right and lots of conjoined theories which are less attractive; and that should come as no surprise, since the TOE notwithstanding, all we have are jigsaw pieces, which can only be as symmetric as they are isolated - indeed, it can be said that the distinction of theories in the first place is nothing more than an account of their mutual asymmetries.
Your comment is very abstract and imprecise. I can't help but feel like both sides of this debate are talking past one another.
Theoretical physics has very little to do with the scientific method. Some of it comes in response to observations, but, for the most part (especially in recent decades), it's really a part of mathematics which generates hypotheses to be tested scientifically later. Theoretical and experimental (including observational, like astronomy) physics are extremely different methodologies but they rely on each other.
The Real Flenuan , I’m not sure what your comment has to do with my own. Also, it’s evident you’re thinking of the “scientific method” in a high school experimental sense, when indeed such a process is no more complex and no less abstract than that of ‘trial and error’ iterated and refined over time - not necessarily exclusively with empirical data, but by something like ‘usefulness’ which encompasses theoretical as well as experimental progress. What science is doing is trying to predict the future (or, given the past, predict the now, etc.), and it does so with heuristics as much as with first principles.
My argument is abstract (and this imprecise) because I believe the utility of beauty in science is just that. As the video well mentions, there are cases in history where beauty helps and hurts us. To my understanding this is evidently not a matter of whether beauty corresponds or does not correspond to veracity, but instead it indicates the contextual dependence of symmetry within a given theory - which I’ve outlined above.
The Real Flenuan , you are probably right in that both sides are talking past one another, because to me the important question isn’t the extent to which beauty or symmetry should guide our theories, but instead why it helps when it does and why it doesn’t when it doesn’t. That too I’ve attempted to answer in part.
@@hyperduality2838 the fact that your name is what it is and you end your rant with a Yoda quote has me triggered. you are simply re-interpreting the painting, sadly though you are adding nothing of consequence.
Hyperduality I like where your head is at, yet again you are adding nothing more than a categorization. I understand your plight; the notion of syntropy - or extropy as I prefer, is quite useful to think about regarding autopoietic FFE systems. However, such physics is not simply opposite to that of dissipative systems - a cyclone forms and dissipates, borrowing order from temperature currents and catalyzes the return to equilibrium, without any change in the underlying physics. Moreover, the distinction between evolving systems and predictive ones remains unclear. I agree with and appreciate your use of the term ‘teleological’ without conjuring religious implementations. It is certainly important for an evolving system to model its own environment - see Markov Blankets, but the conservation of entropy is not obviously implied. You’ll have to do more than express broad brush strokes of categorization if you mean to enlighten me.
Truth is never absolute. That is where the word "Perspective" comes to play.
'Truths are relative to various perspectives and angles of observing things.'
2:41 I love that you went with that picture of Einstein
I like the fact that your take is much more nuanced and informed than Sabine Hossenfelder's one
I like Eric Weintein's take on where to put physics money. Take all the money. Build the collider, and build all the medium experiments, AND all the small experiments. Let's crack this reality wide open!
Well, maybe not literally. Careful with the vacuum decay experiments...
And that would be still like 0.1% of all the taxes we pay...
Wimp
Hey if we trigger a vacuum catastrophe, it will propagate at the speed of light, so no one can ever possibly be conscious that the experiment failed before being annihilated! And you know what they say, success is just failure no one's found out about.
Yes, and waste billions over billions of tax payers money on unproductive experiments with insufficient theoretical basis. I think the payers have every right to expect better reasons for money that could be spent for education oder other social purposes. These experiments are also inside the community not uncontroversial. Also other experiments might be more productive.
@@teckyify Considering hundreds of billions of taxpayer money is being wasted on just about everything else, I see no problem with "wasting" it on science. Even the most unproductive experiment possible still has positive utility, unlike many other things people spend their money on.
The math demands what is truly precision.
The beauty occurs when the whole truly exceeds the sum of the parts.
PBS space time is the perfect channel to fall asleep. Everynight without fail it is the last piece of content I consume before gently closing my eyes listening to his sooth voice. If only my phone could autoswitch off at the video of the video , then life would be perfect. Thx ❤️
It seems quite obvious to me that the most elegant and mathematically beautiful models are _always_ the correct ones.
Now, I'm not saying that the most elegant and mathematically beautiful models are necessarily the best at describing the behavior of the physical universe. I'm just saying that if they aren't, it's because the physical universe is behaving incorrectly.
*Mathematician, signing out.*
Engineer here. All i can say is pi=3
@@devinotero1798 Lmao
@@devinotero1798 Pi is exactly equal to pi
Question: what does beautiful mean? Symmetry?
Its a bit like fractals. Explains a lot of superficially unconnected things from a simple rule or representation, that has a cohesive meaning.
Arguably art often does this too, like linking plots or finding the truth about a character...to paintings making a simple form visible in a complex scene.
And arguably not: in art its also emotional
QM gets peoples emotions piqued like its concept art and obscuritan thing to understand... But its nonlocality and observer effects are ugly in a sense bcause cant be easily explained and are counter-intuitive.
So linking intuition to the truth=beauty.
Same with art, intuition is emotion and is provided in a representation that states a truth (subjectively i suppose) of some kind.
Thank you for the enlightenment, this video truly exposes not only the physics of real/desired explanations from the great scientists, but an understanding from the perspective of "non physic" individuals looking to gain a more true understanding.
This was beautifully said. Well done!
"what is the meaning of life" & "beautiful laws" feel like asking questions like "how do you earth?".
It just makes me ask, what do you mean? Is "earth" a verb n opposite of "unearth" or what? Meaning of life in what? It's asking like "what's the height" but not specifying height of what.
@Pedro Abreu try to write the value of pi or e and tell me what's simple or elegant with some pattern or symmetry in it. Using equations to represent it isn't representing it but just "equating" the value like sum(1/n)(n=1,inf)= Two.
Universality vs subjectivity!
And by subjectivity i mean from an observer, in a situation- not "false bias".
Existentialism is then believing in no universal meaning but believing subjective or experienced 'local' meanings
@@jorgepeterbarton that's really interesting, learnt something new to look up more for distinction.
Speaking of beauty... I would like an episode dedicated to E8 Theory and how it may or may not be wrong
Beautiful work my friend.
Mathematical beauty is not more important than truth.
By the way, I am a mathematician.
One of my favorite things in math is "best fit equations." When I teach this I include a lesson where a set of points yields the best fit line y = x. The correlation coefficient is over 99.99%. However, even a little before the first data point or after the last data point is horribly inaccurate. The data points are from y = sin(x). This is a lesson about mathematical elegance is not equivalent to validity.
So I read the 'Lost in Math' of Sabine Hossenfelder and it has me worried.
Edit: So I butchered her name. :D
same here
Math used as encryption algorithm for chosen ones. Someone encrypting "it is proportional to X and Y as Z", most of people only saying "WOW!" but only chosen able decipher it back to what that means. Reminds me writers who writing many tomes when after reading most of the people only able to remember thousands of "he said that, she said that, he argued ..." and only few able to decipher "he wanted to say X" in one sentence (Viktor Emil Frankl "Man's Search for Meaning" - all he wanted to say is that people need meaning).
@@vladimirseven777 What? 😕
@@nagualdesign Are you one of those who needs decryption from words or logic?
@@vladimirseven777 I don't mean to be rude, I just didn't understand a word you wrote. Care to try again?
*Sabine Hossenfelder has entered the chat*
😉
Hahaha I was typing the same
Yes! Loved her book!
I was thinking exactly that!
Rightfully so 😂💣
Beautiful video .interesting stuff. Thank you 🌹
Great video, thank you!
Thank god I am an atheist
Why?
@@hamobu read what he has written but slowly
Nice : )
ruclips.net/video/bEfpZYYX9p8/видео.html
everytime I see your comments in this channel, I think that there's a hair on my mobile screen😫😫😫
"first" is the simplest, most beautiful comment. It is, however, usually incorrect.
Also it's dumb and ugly
Simple, yes. Beautiful, never. No productive value at all. Beauty in simplicity, but not beauty=simplicity.
Don't understand where all the hatred towards "first" comes from. Like, it seems disproportional to what it really is: a comment.
At this point pretty sure it is just internet inside culture and no one even thinks about it anymore
I have to say this is an ambitious episode. It is not full of hard or catchy science, but it takes on a philosophical topic that is very difficult to communicate well. Props to Matt and everyone involved here.
Complicated proofs, complicated formula, complicated equations are BEAUTIFUL!
Let’s assume that in the next couple of years we unify quantum gravity and find a set of beautiful mathematical equations that explain everything. Do physicists, then, retire?
Whoa whoa whoa, easy there. Don't get ahead of yourself. We don't even have a working theory of quantum gravity yet.
Faustin Gashakamba when I said a couple of years, I meant it as a hyperbole. It might take a couple of hundred years, but the question remains. Right?
@@rhitamdutta1996
We still have other fields with unsolved problems. And the new theory can still have very very very very slight inaccuracies. Saying "After unifying quantum physics and gravity everything is finished." is similar to how some physicists thought of the area at the end of the 19th century. Then relativity & quantum physics came along.
Gamma Ray Neutrino yes, I gave a very naive situation, which ofc won’t happen. Sir Kelvin and other notable scientists thought that there wasn’t much to be discovered but then stuff keeps on piling up and we realise that we are quite far from the truth. My hypothetical situation, albeit poorly framed, demands a course of action that humanity ought to take after discovering *everything*?
No. Whatever knowledge we gain from 'figuring out' quantum gravity will simply reveal to us the next layer of reality.
Was literally just thinking about this. Insane
H sure you were...
I put a comment on one of their recent videos about collider technologies asking how they felt about what Sabine Hossenfelder says about 'beauty' in physics.
Very nice to have a video response!
Thank you for this!