Science and the Quest for Beauty: A Selection from Douglas Hofstadter & Emmanuel Sander’s Surfaces and Essences (2013)

“An entire book could easily be devoted to the fecundity of Albert Einstein’s great analogies. Our goal in this chapter was more modest; it was merely to offer a sampling of them, in order to show that major advances in physics are not the result of virtuoso acts of stand-alone mathematical deduction and formal manipulation of equations, but that, quite to the contrary, they emerge as the fruit of analogies intuited by individuals who have the gift of seeing a unity where others see only diversity, individuals who have a keenly honed instinct for spotting the deep identity of phenomena that look extremely different from each other on the surface, individuals who trust their inchoate faith in such analogical links even more than they trust the imposing mathematical fortresses erected by prior generations, even if it means that extremely well-established, once rigorously worked-out ideas may possibly have to be uprooted and completely thought through anew. Our characterization of Einstein’s way of thinking portrays him as the polar opposite of the clichéd mathematical genius who launches an extraordinarily powerful calculating and deducing machine, which proceeds like a steamroller to mow down every obstacle that it encounters en route. Quite to the contrary, our discussion has shown that Einstein was not guided by phenomenal computational or reasoning skills. His brain did not house an enormous, lightning-fast supercomputer. Rather, he was driven by an unstoppable desire to seek out profound conceptual similarities, beautiful hidden analogies. Indeed, Einstein’s primary psychological driving force was the quest for beauty, and he was spurred on by his certainty that the laws of nature are pervaded by the deepest, most divine beauty of all.”—Douglas Hofstadter & Emmanuel Sander, Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking (2013)