Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray /1

Chp 2, What a Wonderful World, in Sabine Hossenfelder's Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray. Basic Books, NY. 2018.

[Commenting on J Kepler changing his mind, and accepting that it appears to be the planets' orbits around the Sun is better described as ellipses, not circles...]

He received criticism in particular from Galileo Galilei (1564–1641), who believed that “only circular motion can naturally suit bodies which are integral parts of the universe as constituted in the best arrangement.”2 Another astronomer, David Fabricius (1564–1617), complained that “with your ellipse you abolish the circularity and uniformity of the motions, which appears to me the more absurd the more profoundly I think about it.” Fabricius, as many at the time, preferred to amend the planetary orbits by adding “epicycles,” which were smaller circular motions around the already circular orbits. “If you could only preserve the perfect circular orbit and justify your elliptic orbit by another little epicycle,” Fabricius wrote to Kepler, “it would be much better.”3

[Later in the chapter...]

[...] Werner Heisenberg, one of the founders of quantum mechanics, boldly believed that beauty has a grasp on truth: “If nature leads us to mathematical forms of great simplicity and beauty we cannot help thinking that they are ‘true,’ that they reveal a genuine feature of nature.”15 As his wife recalls:

One moonlit night, we walked over the Hainberg Mountain, and he was completely enthralled by the visions he had, trying to explain his newest discovery to me. He talked about the miracle of symmetry as the original archetype of creation, about harmony, about the beauty of simplicity, and its inner truth. 16

Beware the moonlight walks with theoretical physicists—sometimes enthusiasm gets the better of us.