aesthetics – Close Read

The mad world

Kate Wagner writes in The Baffler:

What makes industrial landscapes unique is that they fascinate regardless of whether they’re operating. The hellish Moloch of a petrochemical refinery is as captivating as one of the many abandoned factories one passes by train, and vice versa. That doesn’t mean, though, that all industrial landscapes are created equal. Urban manufacturing factories are considered beautiful—tastefully articulated on the outside, their large windows flooding their vast internal volumes with light; they are frequently rehabilitated into spaces for living and retail or otherwise colonized by local universities. The dilapidated factory, crumbling and overgrown by vegetation, now inhabits that strange space between natural and man-made, historical and contemporary, lovely and sad. The power plant, mine, or refinery invokes strong feelings of awe and fear. And then there are some, such as the Superfund site—remediated or not—whose parklike appearance and sinister ambience remains aesthetically elusive.

One line from my education years that I think will always stick with me was uttered, perhaps in throwaway fashion, by an excellent teacher nonetheless moving on to a larger point: “Ugliness is marked by erasure.” Wagner’s lines above suggest our need for beauty extends even to landmarks of peacetime disaster, such as abandoned factories, railway stations, refineries, etc. because their particular way of being broken and dead contains stories, and lessons, that a pile of collapsed masonry or a heap of trash would not. Apparently there is a beauty in the way they have failed, contained in features of their architecture and design that have managed to rise, or stay, above the arbitrary chaos of unorganised disaster. They are, in other words, haunted by the memory of control.

But as Wagner walks further down this path, in search of the origins of our sense of the picturesque, I’d like to turn back – to an older piece in The Baffler, by J.C. Hallman in September 2016, that questioned the role and purpose of tradition and the influence of scholarship in creating art (as in paintings and stuff). His subject was ‘art brut’, “variously translated as ‘raw,’ ‘rough,’ or ‘outsider’ art” and which stresses “that the work of individual, untutored practitioners trumps all the usual conventions of artistic legacy-building, including the analytic categories of art criticism.” After a helpful prelude – “I prefer dramatic chronicles of the shift from ignorance to knowledge, from innocence to experience” – Hallman elaborates:

… [the painters’] stories … seem calculated to undermine the steady commercial march of art as depicted in high-end auction catalogs[.] In lieu of a stately succession of movements, schools, and styles, art brut gives us an array of butchers and scientists and soldiers and housewives who suddenly went crazy and then produced huge bodies of work—most often for discrete periods of time, three years or eight years or fourteen years—before falling silent and eking out the rest of their isolated, artless lives.

He then draws from the notes of Jean Dubuffet, the French painter, and William James, the American psychologist, to make the case that if only we sidestepped the need for art to be in conversation with other art and/or to respond to this or that perspective on human reality, we could be awakened to shapes, arrangements and layouts that exist beyond what we have been able to explain, and reveal a picture unadulterated by the humans need for control and meaning.

Could this idea be extended to Wagner’s “infrastructural tragedy” as well? That is, whereas a factory embodies the designs foisted by dynamic relationships between demand and supply, and motivated by the storied ambitions of industrialism – and its abandonment the latter’s myopia, hubris and impermanence – what does a structure whose pillars and trusses have been spared the burden of human wants look like? It’s likely such a structure doesn’t exist: no point imposing the violence of our visions upon the world when those visions are empty.

But like the art brut auteurs in Hallman’s exposition, I’m drawn to the question as an ardent world-builder by what I find to be its enigmatic challenge. Just as the brutists’ madness slashed away at the web of method clouding their visions, what questions must the world-builder – the ultimate speculator – ask herself to arrive at a picture whose elements all lie outside anthropogenic considerations as well as outside nature itself? I suppose I am asking if, through this or a similar exercise, it would be possible for the human to arrive at the alien. Well, would it?¹

1. This proposition, and the sense that its answer could lurk somewhere in the bounded cosmology of my psyche, inspires in my mind and consciousness an anxiety and trepidation I have thus far experienced only when faced with H.R. Giger’s art.

Some notes on empiricism, etc.

The Wire published a story about the ‘atoms of Acharya Kanad‘ (background here; tl;dr: Folks at a university in Gujarat claimed an ancient Indian sage had put forth the theory of atoms centuries before John Dalton showed up). The story in question was by a professor of philosophy at IISER, Mohali, and he makes a solid case (not unfamiliar to many of us) as to why Kanad, the sage, didn’t talk about atoms specifically because he was making a speculative statement under the Vaisheshika school of Hindu philosophy that he founded. What got me thinking were the last few lines of his piece, where he insists that empiricism is the foundation of modern science, and that something that doesn’t cater to it can’t be scientific. And you probably know what I’m going to say next. “String theory”, right?

No. Well, maybe. While string theory has become something of a fashionable example of non-empirical science, it isn’t the only example. It’s in fact a subset of a larger group of systems that don’t rely on empirical evidence to progress. These systems are called formal systems, or formal sciences, and they include logic, mathematics, information theory and linguistics. (String theory’s reliance on advanced mathematics makes it more formal than natural – as in the natural sciences.) And the dichotomous characterisation of formal and natural sciences (the latter including the social sciences) is superseded by a larger, more authoritative dichotomy*: between rationalism and empiricism. Rationalism prefers knowledge that has been deduced through logic and reasoning; empiricism prioritises knowledge that has been experienced. As a result, it shouldn’t be a surprise at all that debates about which side is right (insofar as it’s possible to be absolutely right – which I don’t think everwill happen) play out in the realm of science. And squarely within the realm of science, I’d like to use a recent example to provide some perspective.

Last week, scientists discovered that time crystals exist. I wrote a longish piece here tracing the origins and evolution of this exotic form of matter, and what it is that scientists have really discovered. Again, a tl;dr version: in 2012, Frank Wilczek and Alfred Shapere posited that a certain arrangement of atoms (a so-called ‘time crystal’) in their ground state could be in motion. This could sound pithy to you if you were unfamiliar with what ground state meant: absolute zero, the thermodynamic condition wherein an object has no energy whatsoever to do anything else but simply exist. So how could such a thing be in motion? The interesting thing here is that though Shapere-Wilczek’s original paper did not identify a natural scenario in which this could be made to happen, they were able to prove that it could happen formally. That is, they found that the mathematics of the physics underlying the phenomenon did not disallow the existence of time crystals (as they’d posited it).

It’s pertinent that Shapere and Wilczek turned out to be wrong. By late 2013, rigorous proofs had showed up in the scientific literature demonstrating that ground-state, or equilibrium, time crystals could not exist – but that non-equilibrium time crystals with their own unique properties could. The discovery made last week was of the latter kind. Shapere and Wilczek have both acknowledged that their math was wrong. But what I’m pointing at here is the conviction behind the claim that forms of matter called time crystals could exist, motivated by the fact that mathematics did not prohibit it. Yes, Shapere and Wilczek did have to modify their theory based on empirical evidence (indirectly, as it contributed to the rise of the first counter-arguments), but it’s undeniable that the original idea was born, and persisted with, simply through a process of discovery that did not involve sense-experience.

In the same vein, much of the disappointment experienced by many particle physicists today is because of a grating mismatch between formalism – in the form of theories of physics that predict as-yet undiscovered particles – and empiricism – the inability of the LHC to find these particles despite looking repeatedly and hard in the areas where the math says they should be. The physicists wouldn’t be disappointed if they thought empiricism was the be-all of modern science; they’d in fact have been rebuffed much earlier. For another example, this also applies to the idea of naturalness, an aesthetically (and more formally) enshrined idea that the forces of nature should have certain values, whereas in reality they don’t. As a result, physicists think something about their reality is broken instead of thinking something about their way of reasoning is broken. And so they’re sitting at an impasse, as if at the threshold of a higher-dimensional universe they may never be allowed to enter.

I think this is important in the study of the philosophy of science because if we’re able to keep in mind that humans are emotional and that our emotions have significant real-world consequences, we’d not only be better at understanding where knowledge comes from. We’d also become more sensitive to the various sources of knowledge (whether scientific, social, cultural or religious) and their unique domains of applicability, even if we’re pretty picky, and often silly, at the moment about how each of them ought to be treated (Related/recommended: Hilary Putnam’s way of thinking).

*I don’t like dichotomies. They’re too cut-and-dried a conceptualisation.

Debating the business of beauty in ‘Dreams of a Final Theory’

In his book Dreams of a Final Theory, Nobel-Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg discusses the various aspects of the journey toward a unifying theory in fundamental physics. One crucial aspect is the aesthetic of such a theory, and Weinberg’s principal contention is that a unifying theory must be beautiful because if it weren’t beautiful, it wouldn’t be final in every sense. However, thinking so presupposes all scientific pursuits are motivated by a quest for beauty – this may not be the case. More importantly, beauty in being a human construction can be fickle and arbitrary, and interfere with the pursuit of science.

We are trained to expect nature to be a certain way and we call that beauty. As a result, we strive for solutions that are beautiful, i.e. commensurate with the way we see nature to be. But if the physicist confesses to you that the problems he chooses to solve are so beautiful, then that implies he thinks the problem is beautiful in its own right and independently of its solution’s beauty. Does this mean problem-solving in fundamental physics is dominated by a selection bias: whereby scientists choose to solve some problems over others because of the way they appeal to their aesthetic sense? Weinberg thinks so, and presents an example of scientists going after an ‘ugly’ problem – the thermal demagnetization of iron and critical exponent associated with it (0.37) – in the hope that it will have a beautiful solution. He writes,

Why should leaders of condensed matter theory give the problem of the critical exponents so much greater priority? I think the problem of critical exponents attracted so much attention because physicists judged that it would be likely to have a beautiful solution.

The result of their selection bias is the emergence of a dividing line between what needs to be studied and what doesn’t, between what knowledge is codified in the form of principles and what knowledge remains as individual facts. There is an obvious conflict with objective rationality here, which guides the fundamental investigations of nature and excludes unreasonable judgments like those backed by one’s sense of beauty. It seems, according to Weinberg, we are all motivated only to discover a beautiful universe – one that appeals to our preexisting convictions of what the universe ought to be – as if we are defining the beauty we feel we are bound to abide by. What else are we doing when we reject ‘ugly’ solutions but rejecting a form of the truth that doesn’t appeal to our sense of beauty²? By Weinberg’s own admission, what constitutes beauty¹ has been changing with the discovery of more truths: just as beauty was a universality among the dynamics of forces in the early 20th century, beauty in the 21st century seems to be the presence of symmetry principles.

Therefore, by making such decisions, we are actively precluding the ‘existence’ of certain kinds of beauty because we are also forestalling the discovery of certain truths. Weinberg defends this by saying that if aesthetic judgments are working increasingly well, it could be because they are applicable – but the contention he does not address at all is that it is an arbitrary mechanism with which to arrive at the truth. We are simply consigning ourselves to understand beauty in different eras as new deviations from previous definitions of beauty, and removing opportunities to understand other³ (i.e. seemingly unrelated) kinds altogether. For example, the physicist who decides that the ‘ugly’ critical exponent of 0.37 must belong to a more beautiful, overarching theory is immediately pigeonholing other seemingly random exponents to the same fate. What if such exponents are indeed ones of a kind – perhaps even part of a much larger renormalization framework that researchers are desperately seeking to make sense of the many ‘fine-tuned’ constants in high-energy physics, rather than buoys of apparently hidden symmetries themselves that lead nowhere?

There are three additions to this discussion (referenced in the paragraph above):

1. Has beauty always been the pursuit of science? Elegance is definitely a part of the pursuit – if not more – because the elegance of natural phenomena is sure to reflect in the natural sciences, to paraphrase Werner Heisenberg. At the same time, Weinberg goes to some length to mark a distinction between beauty and elegance: “An elegant proof or calculation is one that achieves a powerful result with a minimum of irrelevant complication. It is not important for the beauty of a theory that its equations should have elegant solutions.” That said, the answer to this question is unlikely to be short or general for it questions the motivations of scientists over many centuries. At the same time, some of the greatest scientists – typically Nobel Prize winners – have said the quest for beauty has constituted a significant part of their work simply as an abrogation of randomness. Here is Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar writing about the work of Lord Rayleigh in his book, Truth and Beauty: Aesthetics and Motivations in Science:

… after a scientist has reached maturity, what are the reasons for his continued pursuit of science? To what extent are they personal? To what extent are aesthetic criteria, like the perception of order and pattern, form and substance, relevant? Are such aesthetic and personal criteria exclusive? Has a sense of obligation a role? I do not mean obligation with the common meaning of obligation to one’s students, one’s colleagues, and one’s community. I mean, rather, obligation to science itself. And what, indeed, is the content of obligation in the pursuit of science for science?

2. We started with the assumption that beauty is what we have learnt nature to be. Therefore, by saying a problem or a solution doesn’t appeal to our sense of beauty, it only means it doesn’t appeal to what we already know. This attitude is best characterized by the tendency of well-entrenched paradigms to not give way to new ones, to not surrender in the face of new knowledge that they can’t account for. An example I am particularly fond of in this regard is the story of Dan Shechtman‘s discovery of quasicrystals, which went against the grain of Linus Pauling’s theory of crystals at the time.

Before introducing the third point (which is optional): While it is clear that Weinberg is enamored by the prospect of beauty legitimizing the study of fundamental physics, all of science cannot afford to be guided by as fickle a metric because beauty is what we expect nature to be – according to him – and that signifies a persistence with ‘old knowledge’ while discovering ‘new knowledge’. That deprives the scientific method of its objectivity. Also, the classification of knowledge impedes what scientists choose to study and how they choose to study it as well, and judging the legitimacy of knowledge based on its beauty lends itself to a mode of classification that is not entirely rational. Finally, that scientists also wouldn’t reject new knowledge if it was ugly but that beautiful knowledge would find acceptance faster and scrutiny slower is not… proper.

3. Orson Scott Card’s Speaker for the Dead provides an interesting way to understand this ‘otherness’. It describes a so-called hierarchy of foreignness to understand how alien a person or object is relative to another, in four stages (quoted from the book): Utlänning, “the stranger that we recognize as being a human of our world, but of another city or country”; framling, “the stranger that we recognize as human, but of another world”; raman, “the stranger that we recognize as human, but of another species”; and varelse, “the true alien … which includes all the animals, for with them no conversation is possible. They live, but we cannot guess what purposes or causes make them act. They might be intelligent, they might be self-aware, but we cannot know it.” Similarly, the ‘other’ kinds of beauty we stand to lose, according to Weinberg, are varelse, while we stick to the more fathomable (utlänning, framling and raman) kinds.

The intricacies of being sold on string theory

If you are seeking an appreciation for the techniques of string theory, then Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe could be an optional supplement. If, on the other hand, you want to explore the epistemological backdrop against which string theory proclaimed its aesthetic vigor, then the book is a must-read. As the title implies, it discusses the elegance of string theory in great and pleasurable detail, beginning from a harmonious resolution of the conflicts between quantum mechanics and general relativity being its raison d’être to why it commands the attention of some of the greatest living scientists.

A bigger victory it secures, however, is not in simply laying out string theory but getting you interested in it – and this has become a particularly important feature of science in the 21st century.

The counter-intuitive depiction of nature by the principles of modern physics have, since the mid-20th century, foretold that reality can be best understood in terms of mathematical expressions. This contrasted the simplicity of its preceding paradigm: Newtonian physics, which was less about the mathematics and more about observations, and therefore required fewer interventions to bridge reality as it seemed and reality as it said it was.

Modern physics – encompassing quantum mechanics and Albert Einstein’s theories of relativity – overhauled this simplicity. While reality as it seemed hadn’t changed, reality as they said it was bore no semblence to any of Newton’s work. The process of understanding reality became much more sophisticated, requiring years of training just to prepare oneself to be able to understand it, while probing it required the grandest associations of intellect and hardware.

The trouble getting it across

An overlooked side to this fallout concerned the instruction of these subjects to non-technical audiences, to people who liked to know what was going on but didn’t want to dedicate their lives to it¹. Both quantum mechanics and general relativity are dominated by advanced mathematics, yet spelling out such abstractions is neither convenient nor effective for non-technical communication. As a result, science communicators have increasingly resorted to metaphors, using them to negotiate with the knowledge their readers already possessed.

This is where The Elegant Universe is most effective, especially since string theory is admittedly more difficult to understand than quantum mechanics or general relativity ever was. In fact, the book’s first few chapters – before Greene delves into string theory – are seasoned with statements of how intricate string theory is, while he does a tremendous job of laying the foundations of modern physics.

Especially admirable is his seamless guidance of the reader from time dilation and Lorentzian contraction to quantum superposition to the essentials of superstring theory to the unification of all forces under M-theory, with nary a twitch in between. The examples with which he illustrates important concepts are never mundane, too. His flamboyant writing makes for the proverbial engaging read. You will often find words you wouldn’t quickly use to describe the world around you, endorsing a supreme confidence in the subject being discussed.

Consider: “… the gently curving geometrical form of space emerging from general relativity is at loggerheads with the frantic, roiling, microscopic behavior of the universe implied by quantum mechanics”. Or, “With the discovery of superstring theory, musical metaphors take on a startling reality, for the theory suggests that the microscopic landscape is suffused with tiny strings whose vibrational patterns orchestrate the evolution of the cosmos. The winds of charge, according to superstring theory, gust through an aeolian universe.”

More importantly, Greene’s points of view in the book betray a confidence in string theory itself – as if he thinks that it is the only way to unify quantum mechanics and general relativity under an umbrella pithily called the ‘theory of everything’. What it means for you, the reader, is that you can expect The Elegant Universe not to be an exploratory stroll through a garden but more of a negotiation of the high seas.

Taking recourse in emotions

Does this subtract from the objectivity an enthused reader might appreciate as it would have prepared her to tackle the unification problem by herself? Somewhat. It is a subtle flaw in Greene’s reasoning throughout the book: while he devotes many pages to discussing solutions, he spends little time annotating the flaws of string theory itself. Even if no other theory has charted the sea of unification so well, Greene could have maintained some objectivity about it.

At the same time, by the end of the book, you start to think there is no other way to expound on string theory than by constantly retreating into the intensity of emotions and the honest sensationalism they are capable of yielding. For instance, when describing his own work alongside Paul Aspinwall and David Morrison in determining if space can tear in string theory, Greene introduces the theory’s greatest exponent, Edward Witten. As he writes,

“Edward Witten’s razor-sharp intellect is clothed in a soft-spoken demeanor that often has a wry, almost ironic, edge. He is widely regarded as Einstein’s successor in the role of the world’s greatest living physicist. Some would go even further and describe him as the greatest physicist of all time. He has an insatiable appetite for cutting-edge physics problems and he wields tremendous influence in setting the direction of research in string theory.”

Then, in order to convey the difficulty of a problem that the trio was facing, Greene simply states: Witten “lit up upon hearing the ideas, but cautioned that he thought the calculations would be horrendously difficult”. If Witten expects them to be horrendously difficult, then they must indeed be as horrendous as they get.

Such descriptions of magnitude are peppered throughout The Elegant Universe, often clothed in evocative language, and constitute a significant portion of its appeal to a general audience. They rob string theory of its esoteric stature, making the study of its study memorable. Greene has done well to not dwell on the technical intricacies of his subject while still retaining both the wonderment and the frustration of dealing with something as intractable. This, in fact, is his prime achievement through writing the book.

String theory is not about technique

It was published in 1999. In the years since, many believe that string theory has become dormant. However, that is also where the book scores: not by depicting the theory as being unfalsifiable but as being resilient, as being incomplete enough to dare physicists to follow their own lead in developing it, as being less of a feat in breathtaking mathematics and more of constantly putting one’s beliefs to the test.

Simultaneously, it is unlike the theories of inflationary cosmology that are so flexible that disproving them is like fencing with air. String theory has a sound historical basis in the work of Leonhard Euler, and its careful derivation from those founding principles to augur the intertwined destinies of space and time have concerned the efforts of simply the world’s best mathematicians.

Since the late 1960s, when string theory was first introduced, it has gone through alternating periods of reaffirmation and discreditation. Each crest in this journey has been introduced by a ‘superstring revolution’, a landmark hypothesis or discovery that has restored its place in the scientific canon. Each trough, on the other hand, has represented a difficult struggle to attempt to cohere the implications of string theory into a convincing picture of reality.

These struggles are paralleled by Greene’s efforts in composing The Elegant Universe, managing to accomplish what is often lost in the translation of human endeavors: the implications for the common person. This could be in the form of beauty, or a better life, or some form of intellectual satisfaction; in the end, the book succeeds by drawing these possibilities to the fore, for once overshadowing the enormity of the undertaking that string theory will always be.

Buy the book on Amazon.

¹Although it can also be argued that science communication as a special skill was necessitated by science becoming so complex.