I've never heard the American Public Media program Speaking of Faith, but somehow (I've forgotten whom to credit) came upon this transcript of Quarks and Creation, an interview with the physicist/priest John Polkinghorne. If you can ignore the annoyances of a word-for-word transcript of an audio program, it's a fascinating interview. (For those who prefer an audio format, that's also available.) Polkinghorne touches on subjects as diverse as beauty, truth, quantum physics, prayer, free will, and the dangerous brilliance of creating a world that creates itself.
In 1997, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth, though, as tradition dictates, Polkinghorne does not take the honorific title "Sir" because, as an ordained minister, he would not be expected to wield a sword.
And we're expecting Sir Elton John to use a sword? Hmmm.
[B]eauty is a very interesting thing, and a form of beauty that is important to me is mathematical beauty. That's a rather austere form of aesthetic pleasure, but those of us who work in that area and speak that language can recognize it and agree about it. And we've found in theoretical physics that the fundamental laws of nature are always mathematically beautiful. In fact, if you've got some ugly equations, almost certainly you haven't got it right and you should think again. So beauty is the key to unlocking the secrets of the physical world.
[I]t's very hard, of course, to describe any form of beauty....In some sense you have to perceive it. And it's more difficult with mathematics because you have to be able to speak the language. It's a bit like saying, "This is a wonderful Icelandic poem," but if I don't understand Icelandic, I won't get the gist of it. So mathematical beauty is connected, first of all, with things being elegant and economic. You don't write a great sprawling equation that takes half a page to write down. It's very concise, just perhaps a line with only a few symbols in it. But it turns out that it's also very deep, so that when you explore its consequences, you find this very simple-looking thing. It implies this, it implies that, all sorts of surprising and unexpected things. And if it's a successful part of mathematical physics, of course, it will imply all sorts of phenomena happening in the world. And that's what we mean by mathematical beauty.
