Lost in Math

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First annotation on Sep 7th, 2022. Last on Oct 9th, 2025.

There is an important difference between how physicists and mathematicians see beauty. It's the right combination between explaining empirical facts and using fundamental principles that makes a physical theory successful and beautiful."

According to the Copenhagen interpretation, quantum mechanics is a black box: we enter an experimental setup and push the math button, and out comes a probability. What a particle did before it was measured is a question you're not supposed to ask. In other words, "shut up and calculate," as David Mermin put it.7 It's a pragmatic attitude, but the collapse is widely perceived as "an ugly scar" (Lev Vaidman) that makes the theory "kludgy" (Max Tegmark).8
"The difficulty, of course, is that you don't have to settle these issues," Weinberg continues. "I've had a whole career without knowing what quantum mechanics is. I tell this story in one of the books that my colleague Philip Candelas was referring to a graduate student whose career essentially disintegrated, and I asked what went wrong and he said, 'He tried to understand quantum mechanics.' He could have had a perfectly good career without it. But getting into the fundamentals of quantum mechanics is a losing game." (If you quote this, you can be the first person to quote someone quoting someone quoting himself quoting someone.)

Physicists aren't the only scientists who chase after beauty. James Watson, for example, recalls that Rosalind Franklin was convinced that DNA was structured as a double helix because it was "too pretty not to be true."3 Biologists preferentially study pretty animals.4 And the mathematician David Orrell has argued that climate scientists favor elegant models to the detriment of accuracy.5