Scientific Controversies
No. 5: Is Reality Beautiful?

In contemporary art, Beauty has faded, a prosaic artifice, a distraction from deeper raw truths, maybe even ugly truths. As the exceptional physicist Frank Wilczek (Nobel Prize, Physics) describes in his new book A Beautiful Question, Beauty has proven a luminous ally, a faithful advisor in his discoveries of remarkable truths about the world. But actual experiments are messy and noisy, the elegance of the theory implied but never directly observed. We invite Frank Wilczek and Glennys Farrar (Professor of Physics, NYU) to discuss the subtle question: Is Reality Beautiful?