Response to Gale

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TITLE: Beating Up on Beauty SOURCE: American Scientist 86 no4 308-9 Jl/Ag '98 The magazine publisher is the copyright holder of this article and it is reproduced with permission. Further reproduction of this article in violation of the copyright is prohibited. To the Editors: Interesting though James McAllister's argument in "Is Beauty a Sign of Truth in Scientific Theories?" (March-April) might be, it fails its own crucial test. Dr. McAllister argues that the perceived aesthetic virtue of some particular feature in a theory or model is strongly associated with the empirical success of the theory or model. Hence, when a new theory succeeds over its predecessor, the aesthetic virtues of the new theory replace those of the earlier theory. Moreover, there is no necessity that the aesthetically virtuous features of both theories coincide. Although it sounds plausible, this account fails in the case of quantum theory, as Dr. McAllister's own discussion implicitly reveals. Quantum theory is the most empirically successful theory in the history of all science. When properly used, it can make predictions accurate to 12 decimal places. According to Dr. McAllister's argument, then, we should expect quantum theory's aesthetic virtues to replace those of its predecessor, classical mechanics. And, as he properly notes, quantum theory has shown the weakness of the classical aesthetic virtues: determinism, visualizability and so on. However, he skips over the most important point: Even after more than 50 long years, quantum theory's aesthetic virtues have not in any sense replaced the classical virtues. The reason for this is simple enough: Quantum theory has no aesthetic virtues, not a single one. The number of physicists who would deny that quantum mechanics is ugly tends toward zero as a limit. The main issue, of course, is the socalled "measurement problem." Each of the three main models of quantum theory suffers from some major disconnect with intelligibility (and hence aesthetic virtue) when it attempts to explain how the theory's probabilities are cashed out in terms of an observer's measurements. The "Copenhagen interpretation" requires an instantaneous collapse of the wave function, the "many-worlds interpretation" requires what Richard Schlegal, in his Superposition & Interaction: Coherence in Physics (University of Chicago Press, 1980), justly called a "comic-book science-fiction metaphysics," and neo-Bohmian interpretations require elimination of classical logic, causality or the special theory of relativity. I've given dozens of lectures around the world on the topic "high-energy physics meets cosmology," and there is only one thing that absolutely everyone in my audiences agrees about: Quantum theory might indeed be empirically wonderful, but it's ugly through and through. As the old Texas saying has it: Beauty may be only skin deep, but ugly goes to the bone. The fact that today's physicists inevitably distinguish between quantum theory's superb empirical utility and its complete lack of aesthetic virtue would seem to defeat Dr. McAllister's argument pretty soundly. George Gale University of Missouri-Kansas City Kansas City, MO Dr. McAllister replies: Classical physical theories enjoyed great empirical success for over 200 years, with the consequence that the properties of determinism and visualizability became deeply entrenched in scientists' aesthetic preferences. For quantum theory to seem as beautiful to us as classical theories once did, it will have to establish a comparable empirical track record. Quantum theory is still only 70 years old and deeply alien to our classical intuitions, but the influence of its empirical successes on physicists' aesthetic tastes is already clear. Today, physicists regard the properties of indeterminism and lack of visualizability with far less aversion--that is, with far greater appreciation--than in the 1920s. For example, Erwin Schrödinger found quantum theory aesthetically repulsive in virtue of its unvisualizable character. By contrast, today's physicists are increasingly willing to see aesthetic merit in the abstractness of quantum theory. No mainstream physicist now rejects quantum theory on account of its aesthetic properties. Physicists have been calling quantum theory beautiful since at least the 1960s, contrary to George Gale's claim. For example, Max Jammer judged it "an imposing intellectual structure of great beauty" in his classic The Conceptual Development of Quantum Mechanics (McGraw-Hill, 1966). Of course, an aesthetic 4/6/2008 9:57 PM

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appreciation of quantum theory is developed more readily by professional quantum physicists than by lay people familiar mainly with classical theories. It would be interesting to discover in which of these categories Dr. Gale's lecture audiences fall.

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