Truth or Beauty: Science and the Quest for Order by David Orrell
How scientists’ search for unity and symmetry may be leading them astray
or centuries, scientists have believed the universe to be rational and
ordered, and that the laws governing it must therefore be straightforward.
In this fascinating book, the mathematician David Orrell argues that this
wish to find cosmic order has been motivated as much by an aesthetic
impulse as by a quest for truth. Scientists and mathematicians want the
universe to display qualities such as harmony, unity and symmetry. Above
all, they desire it to be beautiful. James Watson, one of the biologists who
discovered the structure of DNA, was convinced that ‘“the truth, once found,
would be simple as well as pretty”.
But the universe has turned out to be much more complex and much less
harmonious than scientists hoped. The double helix structure of DNA might be
deemed elegant, but it is the “flaws”, or mutations, in DNA that drive
evolution. Quantum theory has turned classical notions of the