Philosophical discussion of the "Beauty" of physics
When I was starting out in university, I often heard lecturers make comments such as "This is a beautiful result", or "This is a particularly elegant derivation". Such comments initially made little sense to me. How is it that a formula or a solution to a problem can be beautiful or elegant? Why do such unscientific terms have a place in such a context? As time progressed, I found more often that such emotional responses to seemingly emotionless work were evoked within myself. Some examples of Physics that I find truly beautiful are:
- The "Photon Clock" Inference of time dilation: This simple inference relies only upon the assumption that the speed of light is constant in all inertial reference frames, and produces the famous result that "moving clocks run slow". It makes use of nothing more than simple geometry.
- The COBE FIRAS experimental data. The Far Infrared Absolute Spectrophotometer was an instrument aboard the Cosmic Background Explorer, a satellite launched in late 1989 to examine and further investigate the Big Bang hypothesis. FIRAS produced a now famous graph of the cosmic microwave background spectrum showing it to be that of a near-perfect "blackbody". The data was so good that error bars are nearly invisible on the graph, and the data matches perfectly that of the theory. This was truly a triumph of experimental physics, and has since yielded the Nobel Prize for two of its creators.
- Young's double-slit experiment: An elegant and enlightening proof of the wave-particle duality of light. Many young scientists find this experiment changes their impression of the way in which the world works permanently.
- More to follow
This list is by no means exhaustive, and based upon my specialisation is certainly more biased towards experimental physics. I assure the reader that all aspects of science contain this "beauty", it is up to you to find it!
Conor Fitzpatrick, 22/12/06
