Read the text and give headings to the numbered paragraphs.

a. The concept of beauty is basically the same in all spheres of life.

b. Dirac stressed the link between validity of physical laws and their mathematical beauty.

c. Einstein and Dirac had rather different approach to science.

d. According to Einstein the beauty of the theory was more       Albert Einstein                                                        Paul Dirac      important than its correctness.

e. Objectivity is a crucial feature of science.

 

It Must be Beautiful

1. _______Of the hundreds of thousands of research scientists who have ever lived, very few have an important scientific equations to their name. Two scientists who were adept at discovering fundamental equations and especially perceptive about the role of mathematics in science were Albert Einstein and the almost comparably brilliant English theoretical physicist Paul Dirac. Neither was a mathematician per se, but both were remarkable in their ability to write down new equations that were so fecund as the greatest poetry. And both were captivated by the belief that the fundamental equations of physics must be beautiful.

2. _______This may sound strange. The subjective concept of beauty is unwelcome in polite intellectual circles, and certainly has no place in academic critique of high art. Yet it is a word that comes readily to the lips of all of us – even the most pedantic critics when we are moved by the sight of a smiling baby, a mountain vista, an exquisitely formed garden.

3. _______What does it mean to say that the equation is beautiful? Fundamentally, it means that the equation can evoke the same rapture as other things that many of us describe as beautiful. Much like the great work of art, a beautiful equation has among its attributes much more than mere attractiveness – it will have universality, simplicity, inevitability, and an elemental power. Think of the masterpieces like Cezanne’s Apples and Pears, Ella Fitzgerald’s recordings of “Manhattan”. During your first experience of each of them, you soon realized that you are in the presence of something monumental in conception, fundamentally pure, free of excrescence and crafted so carefully that its power would be diminished if anything in it were changed. An additional quality of a good scientific equation is that it has utilitarian beauty. It must tally with the results of every relevant experiment and, even better, make predictions that no one has made before. This aspect of an equation’s effectiveness is akin to the beauty of a finely engineered machine.

4._______ The concept of beauty was especially important to Einstein, the twentieth century’s quintessential scientific aesthete. According to his elder son Hans, “He had a character more like that of an artist than a scientist as we usually think of them. For instance, the highest praise for a good theory or a good piece of work was not that it was correct, nor that it was exact but that it was beautiful.” He once went so far as to say that “the only physical theories that we are willing to accept are the beautiful ones” taking for granted that a good theory must concur with experiment.

5._____ Dirac was even more emphatic than Einstein in his belief in mathematical beauty as a criterion for the quality of fundamental theories and even averred that it was for him a kind of religion. In the later part of his career, he spent a good deal of time touring the world, giving packed-out lectures on the origins of the great equation that bears his name, continually stressing that the pursuit of beauty had always been a lodestar and a source of inspiration. During the seminar in Moscow University in 1955, when asked to summarize his philosophy of physics, he wrote on the blackboard in capital letters, ”Physical laws should have mathematical beauty”. For lesser mortals, such aestheticism is a tough and unproductive credo. Science is littered with the remains of theories that were once perceived as beautiful but turned out to be wrong. In 1921, Einstein correctly referred to astrophysicist Arthur Eddington’s new theory of gravitation as “beautiful but physically meaningless”.

 

⇐ Предыдущая567891011121314Следующая ⇒

Поделиться: