De la ciencia como búsqueda estética

 PS. En De las demostraciones he añadido una nota al pie recopilando instancias de esta posición y su opuesta. De normal no suelo actualizar los posts con mis revisiones (que habrán de esperar a alguna recopilación para salir a la luz), pero creo esta tangente merece la pena compartirse de manera aislada.

PS. (12/9/2022) Tiene gracia: aún no he publicado esto y ya está obsoleto xd (paso de actualizarlo por lo dicho).

«Je ne cherche presque plus rien en géométrie que l'art de trouver d'abord les belles constructions.», carta de Leibniz a Galloys del 12/1678.

«Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics.» G. H. Hardy (Medalla Copley 1947) A Mathematician's Apology 1940.

«One thing that makes the adventure of working in our field particularly rewarding, especially in attempting to improve the theory, is that at this basic level of science a chief criterion for the selection of a correct hypothesis, even more than elsewhere in science, seems to be the criterion of beauty, simplicity, or elegance.» Murray Gell‐Mann (Nobel 1969) Particles and principles 1964.

«I think there is a moral to this story, namely that it is more important to have beauty in one's equations than to have them fit experiment. If Schrodinger had been more confident of his work, he could have published it some months earlier, and he could have published a more accurate equation. That equation is now known as the Klein-Gordon equation [Quantentheorie und fünfdimensionale Relativitätstheorie y Der Comptoneffekt nach der Schrödingerschen Theorie 1926 resp.], although it was really discovered by Schrodinger, and in fact was discovered by Schrodinger before he discovered his nonrelativistic treatment of the hydrogen atom [An undulatory theory of the mechanics of atoms and molecules 1926]. It seems that if one is working from the point of view of getting beauty in one's equations, and if one has really a sound insight, one is on a sure line of progress. If there is not complete agreement between the results of one's work and experiment, one should not allow oneself to be too discouraged, because the discrepancy may well be due to minor features that are not properly taken into account and that will get cleared up with further developments of the theory.

[...] It seems to be one of the fundamental features of nature that fundamental physical laws are described in terms of a mathematical theory of great beauty and power» Paul Dirac (Nobel 1933) The Evolution of the Physicist's Picture of Nature 1963, al que también se atribuye la afirmación «This result is too beautiful to be false».

«Plato and the neo-Platonists taught that the beauty we see in nature is a reflection of the beauty of the ultimate, the nous. For us, too, the beauty of present theories is an anticipation, a premonition, of the beauty of the final theory. And in any case, we would not accept any theory as final unless it were beautiful.» Steven Weinberg (Nobel 1979) Dreams of a Final Theory: The Scientist's Search for the Ultimate Laws of Nature 1992.

Por supuesto, no todos creen como Keats Ode on a Grecian Urn 1819 que «"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."». Así, e.g., Faraday se muestra más suspicaz en su: «ALL THIS IS A DREAM. Still examine it by a few experiments. Nothing is too wonderful to be true, if it be consistent with the laws of nature; and in such things as these, experiment is the best test of such consistency.» (Laboratory journal entry #10 040, 19/3/1849, published in The Life and Letters of Faraday 1870), aunque The Royal Institution The Search for a Theory of Everything – with Yang-Hui He hace un alegato muy interesante en contra de esa precaución a propósito del Maxwell-Faraday term (minuto 55). Y a un más tajante es Boltzmann en su: «Eleganz sei die Sache der Schuster und Schneide» (tomada como máxima en el prefacio de Einstein Relativity: The Special and General Theory 1916) o Sabine Hossenfelder Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray 2018. A modo de ejemplo de teorías bellas pero falsas o inútiles respectivamente, piensese en el modelo platónico del Sistema Solar de Kepler Misterium Cosmographicum 1596 o la teoría de los vórtices de Descartes Le Monde 1664 (sugeridos por Pedro Miguel Echenique y Javier Echeverría en la conferencia Ciencia, Belleza y Educación 17/10/2018, 1:25:00), y la geometría proyectiva sintética en el plano (Rota The Phenomenology of Mathematical Beauty 1997).

A título más filosófico, yo veo en las tradiciones empiristas (e.g., con Hume Of the Standard of Taste 1757 fundamentando la ética en la estética, entendida como gusto) y fenomenológicas (e.g., con Levinas Totalité et Infini 1961 reivindicando la ética como filosofía primera, titulando así un ensayo de 1984), en la estética trascendental (entendida como gnosología inferior) de Kant Kritik der reinen Vernunft 1787 y en Dewey Art as Experience 1934 (discutido en Darin McNabb Dewey, el arte, y la experiencia 2020) una reivindicación de la estética como filosofía primera y presupuesto o fundamento para la epistemología. Posición hecha explícita por el giro especulativo en Graham Harman Guerrilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things 2005 (siendo aún más explícito en Aesthetics as First Philosophy: Levinas and the Non-Human 2007), Steven Shaviro Without Criteria 2009 (a partir de Whitehead), Tom Sparrow Levinas Unhinged 2013 y Plastic Bodies: Rebuilding Sensation After Phenomenology 2015 (a partir de Levinas y Ponty), etc. (cf. Gerardo Roberto Flores Peña Estética como filosofía primera).