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Truth and Beauty: Aesthetics and Motivations in Science

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Let me admit at the outset that I read the collection of lectures quite some time back. However, I remember with amazing clarity how much the lectures moved me. Chandrasekhar is not a man who draws superficial parallels between artstic endeavour and the scientific process.

What the essays reveal are something incredibly personal. They reflect what one of the most prominent Astrophysicists of our time feel about aesthetics - from the perspective of C.P Snow's "Two cultures".

And Art, seen from this scientist's point of view, seems to be all the richer for it, contrary to popular belief that rationality strips Art of its elemental passion. The essays go to show that the world we think we live in is not so fragmented after all, and keen perception, augmented with a desire to express, can smoothen the shards that have been left behind in the wake of reductionist thinking.

If you have ever dreamed about the creative cogwheels in scientific history, the essays go to show that they the burning need for an aesthetic whole need not be fundamentally different in the Arts. But there is a interesting and debatable point - which is linked with the unproductive geriatric scientist, and his equally productive counterpart.

But for the last chapter, based on the Karl Schwarzchild lectures on general relativity, most of the essays are at the "scientifically educated" level. One of the most remarkable chapters is about Arthur Eddington, and the Chandrasekhar's open-mindedness is assesing the acutely "conservative" giant of Stellar Physics for his contributions and his drawbacks. One cannot be overwhelmed by history at such moments.

What M.C. Escher's offered the world of mathematical paradoxies and oddities with his lithographs is somewhat symbiotic to Chandrasekhar's lectures. One can only hope that these subtle threads between the "two cultures" will remain.

Professor Chandrasekhar was not only a brilliant physicist, but he was also a very caring and wonderful human being. His views on the aesthetics and motivations in science clearly show his love of fellow beings and how to inspire the younger generation.

This is really a confluence of interests that a creative scientist encounters in his lifetime. Chandra calls it quest for perspectives. He is sort of like Dirac but unlike Dirac, his interests diverge into areas like the renaissance architectures, Beethoven's compositional beauty, Shakespearean prose. He draws parallels from these experiences. They are compelling essays but one can tell Chandra is out of his depth in discussing figures like Beethoven however he corrects himself and warns the reader ahead of time that tackling a subject area other than his own is difficult. I think this happens to everyone who works in a certain field but is awed by other areas such as the arts and tends to draw analogies in form and structure to their own field. His motto throughout is that simplicity is at the heart of anything beautiful and says "Simple is the seal of the true". An interesting read but some chapters at the end of the book are a hard tackle if Astrophysics is not your field, in fact the appreciation for the work is held together more in the early essays. It is a quest for perspectives from a vantage point of an Astrophysicist.

These lectures have almost no depth at all. Chandrasekhar has basically just stitched together a bunch of quotations, adding nothing original himself. Some of the quotations are very interesting, however. I will quote my two favourites here. First, Newton: "I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me." (Newton , p. 47) I think this is a beautiful illustration of the ideal of science as a pursuit of beauty. We're in it for the pebbles and the shells. We love the ocean of truth, certainly---it smoothens the pebbles and houses the shells---but we are not trying to bottle it, only to enjoy its fruits. Second, Boltzmann provides a beautiful illustration that the beauty of science is not a beauty of results but a beauty of arguments, just as the beauty of music is not a beauty of notes but a beauty of compositions: "Even as a musician can recognize his Mozart, Beethoven, or Schubert after hearing the first few bars, so can a mathematician recognize his Cauchy, Gauss, Jacobi, Helmholtz, or Kirchhoff after the first few pages. The French writers reveal themselves by their extreme formal elegance, while the English, especially Maxwell, by their dramatic sense. Who, for example, is not familiar with Maxwell's memoirs on his dynamical theory of gases? ... The variations of the velocities are, at first, developed majestically; then from one side enter the equations of state; and from the other side the equations of motion in a central field. Ever higher soars the chaos of formulae. Suddenly, we hear, as from kettle drums, the four beats 'put n = 5.' The evil spirit V (the relative velocity of the two molecules) vanishes; and ... a hitherto dominating figure in the bass is suddenly silenced ... This is not the time to ask why this or that substitution. If you are not swept along with the development, lay aside the paper. Maxwell does not write programme music with explanatory notes. ... One result after another follows in quick succession till at last, as the unexpected climax, we arrive at the conditions for thermal equilibrium together with the expressions for the transport coefficients. The curtain then falls!" (Boltzmann, p. 64)

The same stories are repeated again and again in the lectures. Lots of nice details, lots of questions, no answers. I read the last chapter of Shakespeare, Beethoven, Newton, Shelley (or so) thrice without being able to understand what the author wanted to say. I do not know much about Indian discourse and discussion style. Maybe I am just too stupid? When you are interested in Milne and Eddington the book is great, nevertheless. But it misses the subject of its title.