[MD] Distinguishing Levels (Platt's Individual level)

[Platt Holden]

  Hi Marsha,  

> Hi Platt,
> 
> Just something to think about.  Not to be a kill-joy, but I found 
> this in the book ''The View from the Center of the Universe', by Joel
> Primack and Nancy Abrams.
> 
> "There is a romantic notion that the true scientific theory is always
> the most beautiful one.  John Keat's "Ode on a Grecian Urn" ends:
> "Beauty is truth, truth beauty, -- that is all / ye know on earth, and
> all ye need to know."  However, truth may be beautiful, but beauty is
> not always truth.  A theory appears beautiful generally because it
> appeals to some deep preference like simplicity (meaning we can
> understand it) or symmetry, but the universe exists on size scales, such
> as the size of atoms, to which humans have no conscious connection. 
> What happens on these size scales is beyond human experience -- and
> maybe even beyond our imagination.  If quantum physics, relativity, and
> modern cosmology have taught us anything, it is that things are not
> always the way they seem.  The universe is under no obligation to be the
> way our aesthetic sensibilities might with or expect.  To assume that we
> earthlings can accurately judge cosmic truth by what seems beautiful to
> us here and now is really hubris, and using beauty this way as a
> criterion for truth can be a prejudice if it keeps a scientist from find
> a successful theory that looks very different from expectations." (p.
> 28)
> 
> Static patterns might come in beautiful packages that point away from
> dynamic quality.

Thanks for the quote. My problem with it is their definition of beauty 
being an appeal to our preference for simplicity and/or symmetry is too 
limited. For me, beauty means in the presence of something good. That 
would include a theory that lacks simplicity and symmetry, but is 
"successful." And for me something good is either points to or is the 
result of DQ, or both, simultaneously.

Platt