Lyu Fu

The belief that beauty leads to truth is prevalent among contemporary physicists. Far from being a private faith, it operates as a methodological guiding principle, essentially when physicists have to develop theories without new empirical data. However, it is unclear how beauty should be understood here for this belief to be justified not merely as useful but as true. In this article, I propose an interpretation of “beauty leads to truth” as “ugliness leads to falsehood,” where “ugliness” refers to a lack of formal harmony, namely, a lack of consistency; in other words, “beauty leads to truth” is interpreted as “inconsistent theories cannot be true.” As this article will show, this conviction (that inconsistent theories cannot be true) is indeed utilized as a methodological principle in scientific practice. Nevertheless, finding a justification is not easy, for this conviction is not merely a logical requirement, nor is it readily supported by direct observation or theoretical considerations. The sole non-circular justification seems to lie in a meta-induction: historically, inconsistent theories are less successful than their consistent successors. This constitutes an aesthetic induction, for (in)consistency can be understood as an aesthetic property, at least within a hermeneutic context, and it may perform a genuinely aesthetic role in this meta-induction. In this sense, “inconsistent theories cannot be true” is a specific instance of “beauty leads to truth,” or, alternatively, “ugliness leads to falsehood.”