A Beautiful Science

Intuition & Aesthetics Lead to Empirical Knowledge

I recently taught a philosophy of science course to a small class of bright undergraduates. At the start of the course, I asked the students a deceptively simple question: What is science? Many of them answered with a stereotypical portrait. The practice of science, they said, involves dispassionate researchers donning white lab coats and assiduously following the Scientific Method step by step, reading the facts off of nature the way you read nutrition information off a cereal box. These students were confident that science focuses on "objective" matters: transparent observations, data-driven hypotheses, controlled experiments, and repeatable results. They envisioned the whole process as almost...