Beauty is truth, truth is beauty.

The full quote from Ode on a Grecian Urn by John Keats goes like this: "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know". I'm a physicist, not a philosopher and poet. This idea has been discussed to death around here as well, so forgive me for any reposting I might inadvertently do.<br><br>However, to the extent that I have been exposed to this idea, I have never been satisfied with the answers that philosophers give to this problem. Physicists, on the other hand, seem to usually ignore it.<br><br>My take on this is influenced by the fact that I am a physicist and the things I've learned from that discipline. If one looks at a few atoms or a gas of a few atoms, and writes down all the information one has about this system, then usually it is not very satisfying to look at. If I tell you the positions and velocities of two particles in 3-dimensional space I have described six numbers. What do they mean? I can use them to figure out where those two atoms will be in the future, but I cannot look at those six numbers and figure out anything about this system without first carrying out a calculation. If I tell you where they are now, and where they are going, you can't even look at those numbers and figure out what they mean unless you understand a foreign language that we call mathematics.<br><br>Now, when we instead look at systems composed of an enormous number of atoms, then strange things happen. The meaning of what we have written down, and which mathematical manipulations we must carry out in order to understand what we have, become much more obvious. Let’s say I wrote down all of the information about the weather. That would be a truly astronomical number. And looking at that number, even if you know how to speak the language of mathematics, it would not be terribly meaningful to you, nor would carrying out any mathematical operations on that number make what you have any more obvious.<br><br>However, if we look at a picture of a weather front, then we have, encoded into that picture, an enormous amount of information. The position of the clouds. The amount of cloud cover. The color of the clouds. The wind direction. What the high and low pressure systems are. Information about temperatures in front of and behind the front. And yet you can look at that picture, without knowing the first thing about the mathematical language in which that information is encoded, and immediately understand what it means. <br><br>The system composed of a large number of things like atoms or water molecules or whatever is somehow a system whose meaning can be immediately understood in a way that a system composed of a small number of things cannot. If you carry out an enormous number of operations on the huge system composed of a vastly larger number of particles, you can figure out what that information means, but if you carry out an enormous number of operations on a small system, then your understanding of what you now have is not really very different from your understanding of what you started with. In other words, the operations you carry out on a large system somehow means that you know more about what you have once you are done, but not the smaller system.<br><br>Furthermore, when systems are composed of a very small number of parts, then figuring out what information you have about that system is computationally intensive and requires a huge amount of computing power. But we can look at a picture of a weather system in an instant and immediately understand what information it contains. By immediately, I mean in a time that is on a natural human timescale. It cannot be encoded in a way that requires an enormous amount of computation to figure out because our brains do not function in that way.<br><br>And yet somehow, the more particles a system contains, the more the information which describes that system somehow becomes encoded in a way that our brains can process it immediately. You cannot look at any six numbers and immediately understand what they mean. But we look at any natural picture and somehow know a lot of what it represents immediately. Human beings can look at a picture of an ocean and immediately understand that it is not a large amount of the element Pb (lead).<br><br>I would like to offer the conjecture that this is beauty. Systems composed of many parts have an aesthetic quality to them that systems composed of a few parts cannot. This arises from the fact that we can look at systems composed of a huge number of parts and immediately understand what they represent in a way we cannot immediately understand systems composed of few parts.<br><br>This is not the only thing that I think is beauty. I am not saying that this is the only thing and that everything else that we consider beautiful is not in fact beautiful. But I do think that a large part of why we find natural systems beautiful is that they immediately convey a huge amount of information in a way that our brains can process on a natural timescale. I think that if we look at a picture of a sunset or a mountain range or an ocean, these things immediately convey to us a huge amount of information that we can process and understand without having to perform a huge amount of computation. This huge amount of processing that we carry out immediately cannot be encoded in any mathematical operations we decide to carry out on some mathematical formula because those operations take a long time. But systems composed of a huge number of parts have the property that, somehow, a huge amount of computation gets carried out so that we can look at them and understand what they mean the moment we see them.<br><br>And I believe this is part of why we find them beautiful.<br><br>Furthermore, when we look at a picture of the natural world, we usually do not even realize that we are processing this information. This is because the information is immediately available to us as soon as we see it, and usually it is obvious to us and we do not even realize that we have processed it until we decide to talk about it. This is because we do not usually realize that we are performing calculations until we carry out an enormous number of them. Carrying out a small number of operations is not noticeable to us. But carrying out an enormous number of them is noticeable, and this is the difference between systems composed of a small number of parts and systems composed of a large number of parts. Carrying out operations on the former is obvious to us, and a large amount of computation is noticeable to us. But carrying out an enormous number of operations on the latter is somehow not noticeable to us, because if it were, then looking at a sunset would not be aesthetic. It would just be an absurdly tedious task that we could never carry out.<br><br>And finally, while this is only a conjecture, I believe that the way in which aesthetic natural systems convey a lot of information in an immediately obvious way is not necessarily restricted to visual information. I believe it could be auditory information, like listening to music. Or tactile information, like touching snowflakes. I think that beauty is also the way in which we can touch or hear or smell natural systems and immediately understand a huge amount of information about what we are touching or hearing or smelling.<br><br>What are you people’s thoughts on this?