What does beauty have to do with science?
In Truth and Beauty: Aesthetics and Motivations in Science, Indian Nobel Prize winner Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar takes the readers on a rather unconventional journey into the world of scientific enquiry, but this time through the lens of beauty, elegance, and aesthetics. Across essays and lectures spanning forty years, Chandrasekhar explores how principles of beauty can influence scientific judgment. Consider black holes, once regarded as mathematical oddities, that revealed symmetry and simplicity upon further study. Chandrasekhar’s own work on their stability offers a striking example of how an aesthetic sense can shape the search for scientific truth.
Drawing on examples from the works by Shakespeare, Beethoven, Newton, Einstein, and more, Chandrasekhar shows how some of the most consequential ideas in science resemble great works of art and literature in their simplicity, balance, and elegance.
Beauty moves scientists no less than it does artists. For him, science thus becomes a creative pursuit. Truth and Beauty is a testament to Chandrasekhar’s devotion to approaching subjects like stellar structure and black hole theory with an appreciation of the underlying aesthetic power ever-present in nature.
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (1910–95) was born on 19 October in Lahore (then a part of British India). He was the eldest son in a family of ten children. Educated initially at home, he later attended Hindu High School, Triplicane, Madras. He completed his BSc in physics at the Presidency College. In 1930, he received a scholarship from the Government of India to study at the University of Cambridge where he worked as a research student under Professor R. H. Fowler. He earned his PhD in 1933 and was elected to a Prize Fellowship at Trinity College. In 1937, Chandrasekhar joined the faculty of the University of Chicago, where he would remain for the rest of his life. Chandrasekhar was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, with William A. Fowler, in 1983 ‘for his theoretical studies of the physical processes of importance to the structure and evolution of the stars’.
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