Truth As Beauty, Mathematics, Analytic Philosophy, and Physics
Mathematical considerations, such as symmetry and complexity, are used for analysis in theoretical aesthetics. This is different from the aesthetic considerations of applied aesthetics used in the study of mathematical beauty. Aesthetic considerations such as symmetry and simplicity are used in areas of philosophy, such as ethics and theoretical physics and cosmology to define truth, outside of empirical considerations. Beauty and Truth have been argued to be nearly synonymous, as reflected in the statement "Beauty is truth, truth beauty" in the poem Ode on a Grecian Urn by John Keats. The fact that judgments of beauty and judgments of truth both are influenced by processing fluency, which is the ease with which information can be processed, has been presented as an explanation for why beauty is sometimes equated with truth. Indeed, recent research found that people use beauty as an indication for truth in mathematical pattern tasks.
Read more about this topic: Being Beautiful In Spirit
Famous quotes containing the words truth, analytic and/or physics:
“The truth and regularity of a character is not, in justice, to be looked upon as broken, from any one single act or omission which may seem a contradiction to it:Mthe best of men appear sometimes to be strange compounds of contradictory qualities.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)
““You, that have not lived in thought but deed,
Can have the purity of a natural force,
But I, whose virtues are the definitions
Of the analytic mind, can neither close
The eye of the mind nor keep my tongue from speech.””
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“Now the twitching stops. Now you are still. We are through with physiology and theology, physics begins.”
—Alfred Döblin (1878–1957)