Murray Gell-mann is a physicist who reflects on the “theory of everything”. He mentions that there seems to be a relationship with elegance and beauty to finding truth.
What are things that can be said to be beautiful or elegant? Elegance refers to simplicity. Elegance refers to something all-encompassing. Elegance is something that isn’t complicated. Elegance is something that you can immediately relate to–something you can immediately say is beautiful or elegant.
Beauty is a unified theory. There is a simple statement that explains everything. Beauty is symmetry. Beauty is a self-similarity in Nature on all levels. We search for this beauty and we will be closer to truth.
K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple Stupid!)
Are elegant questions more likely to be right than inelegant ones? Do you need something more, something supernatural, something inexplicable–to explain reality?
Murray Gell-mann reflects on these things in this wonderful talk on TED.
That was a quite thought provoking speech. It actually seems simple, but there are so many issues which crop up when you really think of it.
From an atheists point of view, the speaker is explaining that beauty can come from science with the intermingling of all the different scientific theories. Theist on the other hand will sometimes state that life is beautiful since an intelligent being is responsible for life and beauty.
The speaker didn’t exactly state that he was an atheist, but when I heard one of his last lines, which was in response to the question “Isn’t there something more to what you have there?”, you can’t help but think of his reply, “You don’t need something more to explain something more.”