Plato seems to be making a bit of a comeback in the world of science. Last year Andreas Wagner argued in Arrival of the Fittest, that evolution works like a search engine, painstakingly finding those optimum DNA sequences that already exist in a sort of Platonic library of ideal genetic texts.
In his engrossing new book, A Beautiful Question [Penguin Press], Nobel laureate and professor at MIT Frank Wilczek also tips his cap to the old Greek philosopher when he argues that the world was created to embody beautiful ideas, and if there is a Creator, he's an artist above all.
In 2004, Wilczek was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics along with David Gross and Hugh David Politzer for co-discovering asymptotic freedom, a fundamental aspect of subatomic physics in which the strong nuclear force counterintuitively weakens the closer quarks are to each other.
Wilczek was raised Catholic and identifies as an agnostic. But his new book is saturated with the sensibility of his childhood faith and pays homage to the conviction of his great forebear Galileo.
Galileo Galilei made the beauty of the physical world central to his own deep faith, and recommended it to all: "The greatness and the glory of God shine forth marvelously in all His works, and is to be read above all in the open book of the heavens."
The central question for Wilczek is whether the universe embodies beautiful ideas. The question may seem like a strange thing to ask, he writes in the opening pages:
Ideas are one thing, physical bodies are quite another. What does it mean to “embody” an “idea”? Embodying ideas is what artists do. Starting from visionary conceptions, artists produce physical objects (or quasi-physical products, like musical scores that unfold into sound). Our Beautiful Question, then, is close to this one:
Is the world a work of art?
Wilczek believes the answer is a resounding yes, and further, it's not a belief that seemed to take hold in classical religious tradition. In the Abrahamic religions, for example, he writes, conventional doctrine holds that the Creator set out to embody some combination of goodness and righteousness, and to create a monument to His glory.
On a higher theological plane, the Creator’s motivations are sometimes said to be so awesome that finite human intellects can’t hope to comprehend them. Instead we are given partial revelations, which are to be believed, not analyzed. Or, alternatively, God is Love. None of those contradictory orthodoxies offers compelling reasons to expect that the world embodies beautiful ideas; nor do they suggest that we should strive to find such ideas. Beauty can form part of their cosmic story, but it is generally regarded as a side issue, not the heart of the matter.
Broadly speaking, I think this is certainly true, although I imagine a few of the saints, such as St. Francis and St. Bonaventure, might quarrel with him on the matter.
The bulk of A Beautiful Question deals with specific beautiful ideas: from Pythagoras to Plato and the first engagement with the ideal world of numbers; from Galileo to Kepler to Newton and the scientific revolution's initial grappling with the idea of symmetry in the laws of motion; from Maxwell to Einstein and the symmetries of fields; and in the end a wonderful tribute to the overlooked and under-appreciated mathematical work of Emmy Noether.
Of course, Wilczek writes with the built-in assumptions of his specialty, where mathematics is the primary tool. I can imagine that many an evolutionary biologist would be left cold by the idea that the world is a work of art. On the landscape where evolution unfolds, as Darwin himself said, beauty can be found--but it's a frightening (and messy) beauty as many have pointed out.
For myself, Wilczek's enthusiasm is contagious--and I think he's hit on a theme that I hope more scientists and philosophers--and theologians--will explore.
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