Can scientific experiments be beautiful? with Dr. Milena Ivanova

Today’s guest is Dr. Milena Ivanova, a philosopher of science based at Fitzwilliam College at Cambridge University, where she is a fellow, graduate tutor, and the Director of Studies in Philosophy. Dr. Ivanova’s research involves studying aesthetics in the expansive field of science and publishing numerous articles, papers, and books on the subject. She is the author of  Duhem and Holism (Cambridge UP, 2021) and co-editor of The Aesthetics of Science: Beauty, Imagination, and Understanding (Routledge, 2020). 

Dr. Ivanova lends us her expertise to explore the following:

1. What attracted Dr. Ivanova to studying beauty in science
2. The relevance of beauty and its role in understanding science
3. Functionality and optimality of purpose contributing to an experiment’s beauty
4. The beauty of experiments beyond visual aesthetics through design and significance 
5. On beauty contributing to bias
6. The benefit of learning about beauty in science for scientists and philosophers
7. Applying beauty and the awareness of it in other aspects 

To learn more about Dr. Ivanova’s work, visit https://www.milenaivanova.co.uk/

Also, check out her books such as:

Duhem and Holism

https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/abs/duhem-and-holism/0D574554BB82648C0E5E1DFA6C550300

The Aesthetics of Science: Beauty, Imagination, and Understanding

https://www.routledge.com/The-Aesthetics-of-Science-Beauty-Imagination-and-Understanding-1st-Edition/Ivanova-French/p/book/9780367141141

You can also explore the topic of our interview in the following articles:

When is a scientific experiment like a beautiful work of art? 

https://aeon.co/essays/when-is-a-scientific-experiment-like-a-beautiful-work-of-art

What is a beautiful experiment?

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10670-021-00509-3

The aesthetics of scientific experiments

https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/phc3.12730

Watch out for our new episodes every 1st and 15th of the month!

Support us on Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/BeautyatWorkPodcast

Transcript

(preview)

Milena: We can understand why we would think like that, since sometimes we would observe this really special phenomena, beautiful things we'll observe under the experimental setup, or even the instruments that were used, especially back in the day when there was so much craftsmanship involved in making a microscope or the air pump.

So, we could think that there are all these features that are contributing, the performative aspect as well of the experiment that are contributing to the aesthetic value of the experiment. But I said that I don't think those are essential features. What actually matters is that concept of the relationship between the design and the result, how the experiment achieved its purpose, and the elegance behind the setup. It also really encompasses and embodies the ingenuity of the experimenters.

(intro)

Brandon: I'm Brandon Vaidyanathan. This is Beauty at Work, a podcast about how beauty shapes our world and the work that we do. In this season, we're looking at beauty in science.

Hello, everyone. My guest today is Dr. Milena Ivanova. She is a by-fellow at Fitzwilliam College, University of Cambridge. She studied history and philosophy of science at the University of Athens. She also holds a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Bristol. Melina is a co-editor of the Aesthetics of Science: Beauty, Imagination, and Understanding from Routledge in 2020, and also author of Duhem and Holism from Cambridge University Press in 2021. Currently, she's co-editing a book on the Aesthetic Nature of Scientific Experiments that's forthcoming with Routledge. 

(interview)

Brandon: Milena, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for taking the time. It's such a pleasure to speak with you.

Milena: Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure as well.

Brandon: Yeah, I'm really a great admirer of your work. I think you're doing some really awesome stuff. Tell me about what drew you to this topic of beauty in science as a philosopher.

Milena: It's just really hard to pick one particular moment in history of my academic development. But I think the love for the relationship between science and art goes really back before I even knew that there was philosophy and history of science discipline that existed. I think it goes back to being a young student at school and finding out things about art that I did not know, and the relationship between art and science that I had no idea about. I used to think science is one completely different thing from art, and finding out — I remember, for instance, studying sculpture. I was really fascinated by ancient Greek sculpture and just finding out how much knowledge was involved in creating motion in this ancient Greek statues, from going from very rigid form to being able to depict very beautiful proportions of the human body and movement, very complex movement, how this started, 600 BC when you have this very rigid depictions of the body, to the improvement in anatomy and physics, understanding gravity, how that impacted the ability for then the Greek sculptors to portray motion. That was pretty fascinating to me, how this relationship existed and finding out that art is like — Leonardo Davinci was actually a scientist, too. His work was really important in anatomy, and valued not just for its beautiful, artistic dimensions but also for the development of scientific knowledge. That dimension was very important, too. Understanding that there is this relationship between science and art was, I think, the first spark in wanting to pursue further this connection.

Then being very privileged to study history and philosophy of science, and understanding values behind the production of knowledge in science and context and what values people have in different periods, and how artistic developments often went hand in hand with scientific developments. This all was really there to push me to think about the subject. But I have to say I shied away from it when I was doing my research. So, when I was a PhD student, I was thinking about a very different thing. I was thinking about the development of special and general relativity, and the development of non-Euclidean geometry. It had a very specific timeframe in science. That's what I did my PhD on — the philosophical questions that arise in that particular period of time and the development of physics.

By studying this period, I could not not notice that most of the scientists that were studying constantly talked about beauty. That was the final push for me to start thinking about the beauty in science more seriously. When I finished my PhD, I felt a little bit more free to be creatively constructive with what questions I'm going to be answering next. I felt like the pieces were there to start asking some really interesting questions about beauty and science, and what role it plays. That's how I got to the research that I'm doing today.

Brandon: Okay. Fantastic. Thanks. The concept of beauty, though, that's something that I'm curious about, what you think of it. When you were studying, I guess, before you even started your philosophical studies, what did you think of the concept of beauty? Was that something that interested you as a concept, or is it mainly from the kinds of narratives of scientists that you found yourself interested in this idea?

Milena: I was definitely interested in the concept of beauty way before I went to university. That's probably because I grew up during the communist regime in Bulgaria. I was really interested in architecture. The immediately visual buildings around me were not very beautiful at all. There were these concrete structures that were built to house a lot of people. They were built at a particular design and function in mind, but they were really not very visually pleasing. Whereas on the other hand, our historic buildings are incredibly beautiful. So, I developed interest in architecture, and just constantly pondered on this question. Why don't we build more beautiful buildings around here? Why is that neighborhood looking so gray and not very appealing, and not visually pleasing at all? But then you go into other places, and you feel like the buildings are works of art. You really admire them, and you have special experiences when you appreciate them. Definitely, it was in my mind, but it never occurred to me that science can be beautiful until I went to university.

Brandon: Wow. Great. So, tell me. The concept of beauty has been criticized by many. It has been considered in some fields of the arts as outmoded. The preference seems to be to talk about aesthetics more broadly. What makes beauty relevant to scientists as a concept? Is it helpful for understanding the practice of science?

Milena: I think it's definitely helpful. I think it's really important that we understand what role it plays in scientific activities. We can understand why in art, we have this move away from beauty. Because art has developed in many different ways, and we have revolutionary art that challenges many concepts. One of them is what art is. We have a presentation of very ordinary, displeasing object in an artistic setting. Then we get to wonder, is this really artwork? What makes it art work? Was the positioning of an ordinary object like the flimsy rhino, does positioning it in the museum or the art gallery what makes it an artwork? What is it exactly about it? Because it's not the intrinsic features. There's nothing very beautiful about the artifact itself. So, we can see how traditionally, we get to interrogate these concepts.

In philosophy of art and in history of art, we have very much evolution of understanding what art is, what it's meant to do. We get to see some artistic works as experiments and actually asking these questions. We get to really consider how our reactions are, what our intuitions are about. What makes something an art work when we're presented with these kinds of experimental works?

In science, it's really interesting that scientists continuously talk about beauty no matter what the setting, no matter how science is changing. We see that it's a notion that continues to be used, and that it plays interesting functions in reasoning. We think that one interaction with beauty that we have when you start even inquiring something is just appreciating nature. That can be triggering into investigation because we find nature beautiful. Many phenomena are incredibly beautiful. That can spark fascination to find more about the function behind a particular phenomenon that we encounter.

But we see that scientists use this concept also when they describe how they select hypotheses, or design experiments, or reconstruct images, or present simulations, or write code. That idea that they're using these kinds of aesthetic judgments and particularly think about beauty in those contexts is really interesting. Different scientists in different fields continuously talk about these features throughout different traditions as well.

What's really interesting is, what is it doing there? Is it simply aiding selection when there is no other option, no other criteria perhaps or considerations to help us make choices? If you have two explanations that fit with the phenomena, and one is more beautiful, why not choose that if you can think that it's a purely heuristic tool for us to use beauty?

But there's so many scientists that say something much more substantial than this, that they think there's a special relationship between beauty and truth. They think that beauty can be actually the factor that makes you trust a particular hypothesis or theory. We find that this persists. We have this idea of going back from the ancient philosophers like Plato, to people like Paul Dirac and Albert Einstein, to more recently scientists like Murray Gell-Mann, for instance, expressing these ideas. So, it's really fascinating that scientists do make these judgments about beauty. They use it in different ways.

From the perspective of a philosopher, what they want to understand is, is that a good idea? First of all, how are these judgments made? In what contexts? Then is that a good idea? What exactly can we say beauty justifiably can do in scientific theorizing? That's the big question, the big questions behind this kind of reasoning. But the more, I think, interesting question at the moment I'm thinking about is actually just understanding how these judgments enter in designing experiments, in evaluating data, more practice-related questions.

Brandon: Yeah, that's great. Certainly, I would imagine, the experience of encountering the beauty of nature, or of natural objects, or the phenomena that scientist’s study might be fairly consistent across history. But then the particular heuristic uses of beauty, certain equations as guides to truth, is that mode of seeing beauty in the scientific objects or in the process of doing science? Do you see that as being a consistent feature of science, or is there something new? Basically, has the concept of beauty changed in some way in these dimensions of science?

Milena: My initial approach was that, well, why should we expect that there is anything consistent among different scientists in different scientific periods? Science changes really dramatically in different centuries, how it's done, thinking about experimental practice. Also, we see dramatic changes if we think about tabletop experiments in the 17th century. Simple, very cheap stuff. Equipment is cheap. One person performs. If we think about today, thousands of people are involved in the construction of massive experimental setups. There are such different ways of making an experiment, for instance, or the scientific theories as well. Very different. Why should we expect there is anything stable?

But I think there are ways to address this question and think that there is something stable actually. That's certain ways to understand beauty as a notion that captures a relationship or functionality, basically, how well something suits its purpose. That can be achieved by different ways. But there's something stable in appreciating optimality for purpose. I think that kind of focus can help us escape this idea that, well, if people have such a different disagreeing conceptions of beauty, how can they possibly even say this judgements have any objectivity to them? How could we think that scientists can agree among themselves when they talk about beauty? I think if we think about that way about functionality, appreciating functionality and optimality for purpose, we can think that, yeah, we can accommodate a lot of different ways of doing science and doing experiments, and still appreciate this intricate beauty behind that setup.

Brandon: Could you give us an example of what that might look like, that appreciation for functionality and optimality across experiments, and what role beauty plays there?

Milena: Absolutely. I've argued in my work that when we ask what makes an experiment beautiful, we can think about some very immediate features to experiments that come to our mind. Maybe I should give an example to this. One very nice experiment that's really celebrated for its beauty is Leon Foucault's experiment to demonstrate Earth's rotation. That was performed in 1851 in the Pantheon, in Paris. It's a very simple experiment, which basically involves taking this brass sphere hang on the rope, and things fall in motion. There was some sand underneath it. So, people could go into the Pantheon to see that experiment. They will see this kinetic sculpture around, slowly moving. There's something immediately beautiful about it, if you think about that experience of observing it as a pleasing experience to have.

There are some visually pleasing features to that experiment. But I argue that these features are really not necessary or sufficient to our aesthetic appreciation of the experiment. I've argued that what really matters is how this experiment achieved this goal, what's achieved and how. The beauty of that experiment lies exactly in this idea — that by using these very ordinary objects, very economical setup, the scientist had the ingenuity to create the setup that optimally showed the phenomenon that they wanted to show. So, the experiment achieved its purpose. It had optimality and functionality. So, these considerations, I think, are what matters. It could be translated into a very complex experiment that perhaps will not have these visual features at all, or we will not be able to perceive anything about the results.

In large-scale experiments, it takes a really long time to really have confidence in what exactly results we have obtained. But when we think about the kind of functionality for purpose, we can still talk about beauty in that way and appreciate what really matters. It's intellectual beauty, appreciating design for purpose, that seems to be able to carry over despite the difference in the experimental traditions we're thinking about.

Brandon: Right. So, it seems the purpose of the experiment is really critical then for an assessment of what is beautiful about that experiment. Because I've seen Foucault's pendulum in a museum. It's certainly impressive. My kids would stand in awe of the shapes that it produces. It never struck me that there was something actually optimal about the way that it was done. I suppose I would need to better understand the context in which those goals were being pursued, and what made this particular development innovative in a way that has, I suppose, made it stand the test of time as an exemplary experiment.

Milena: Absolutely. In that way, the works that scientists produced are very similar to the works artists produced. Because you don't necessarily understand an artwork from your first interaction with it. Not every artwork will give you visually-pleasing features, or the aesthetic value of the artwork will not be immediately accessible to us. We'll have to do a little bit of work and think why did the artist select this particular tone of colors or these particular shapes to express the emotions that they wanted to express? For instance, if we're thinking about painting, usually, interacting with an artwork requires a little bit of work. That's when we consider artists to be successful — when they make us do that work.

Brandon: Milena, you've argued that beauty matters both for the design of experiments and for their significance. Could you unpack that for us? What does that mean?

Milena: Well, what I was arguing is to step away from thinking that the beauty of an experiment will be found in the visual features. We can very quickly think like that if we think about some very famous experiments, particularly in early scientific practices. Early experiments in the Royal Society times, 17th and 18th century, had oftentimes very performative and had very immediately accessible features to them. So, we could very quickly arrive at this decision that the beauty of the experiment was just the setup we get to see. We can understand why we would think like that, since sometimes we would observe this really special phenomena, beautiful things we'll observe under the experimental setup, or even the instruments that were used, especially back in the day when there was so much craftsmanship involved in making a microscope or the air pump.

So, we could think that there are all these features that are contributing, the performative aspect as well of the experiment that are contributing to the aesthetic value of the experiment. But I said that I don't think those are essential features. What actually matters is that concept of the relationship between the design and the result, how the experiment achieved its purpose, and the elegance behind the setup. It also really encompasses and embodies the ingenuity of the experimenters.

We have, for instance, the experiment that was designed by Michelson and Morley to test the relative velocity of the Earth with respect to the ether. Einstein said about this experiment that it was absolutely beautiful because of the way it was designed, and that Michelson deserve the title of 'the artist in the science.' There's this appreciation for the design and how that design optimally delivers the result. I think that interrelationship between the two is where the aesthetic value really comes from. That can be illustrated with really insightful experiments, that we might wonder if there's anything visually pleasing about them. But there was an elegant idea, really well optimally designed setup using the best materials for the job to deliver important results.

Some examples in science can illustrate this. The Meselson-Stahl experiment in biology carries the name of the most beautiful experiment in biology. We can see why that is the case. That experiment was so well-designed for purpose. It delivered incredibly important results. It had a very significant and clear results. Decisively decided between three hypotheses that were entertained at the time, after the question was basically positive as to how DNA replicates. That experiment was really well-designed for purpose using innovative materials for the time, illustrating the creativity, ingenuity of the experimenters to deliver that goal.

When we think about what was beautiful about it, it was the design and the significance, that relationship between the two, that I think we should really be focusing on when we think about the aesthetic value of it rather than anything else.

Brandon: Right. Could you say a bit more about significance? Is it in terms of the experiment being capable of decisively adjudicating between rival hypotheses? What counts as significance there?

Milena: Yes, that's a great question. Because the two examples we discussed, so far, do something very important and quite straightforward to understand. The pendulum experiment wanted to demonstrate something, and it did. It demonstrated Earth's rotation. The Meselson-Stahl experiment was a crucial experiment in science. It decided between three hypotheses. That's great, right? Another experiment we can think, detected particles like the LHC, a few years ago, detecting the Higgs boson. That's success stories in science when we have demonstration of effects that we want. We have hypothesized over but we have not demonstrated, or we have the confirmation of a theory or hypothesis, or we have the discovery of a particle or a phenomenon generally. That's great. But I think we need to have a much more broad notion of significance. Because sometimes, even now, results can be very significant.

We wouldn't want to say that an experiment that did not achieve discovery for good reasons is not beautiful. So, I was motivated to think about this by thinking about the ether experiment, and the fact that well, there was no detection there but for good reason. That experiment was well set for purpose.

In the sense, I take that experiment to show us something important about what we consider as a significant result. The fact that sometimes obtaining no results or just results that do not align with expectation, actually, is where the beauty gets derived from.

In a sense, that's parallel to artworks as well. Sometimes the most interesting, beautiful artwork can be the one that really challenges your accepted assumptions. That kind of experiment. Of course, not every result experiment, but it's very much contingent on many factors. Some now results also generate significant basically consequences by asking you to re-examine assumptions. That can be really productive. So, here's where we talk about productive surprise and disruptive, basically, results that will lead to something important. Enrich our knowledge, enrich our engagement with the subject. Here, we can make a distinction between the results that align with theoretical expectation and the ones that do not, and the fact that the lots are very often can be really where the goods are, by pushing us, enabling to ultimately progress.

Brandon: Is surprise a crucial feature then of significance?

Milena: I think so, surprise and what they call sometimes productively disruptive result as well. Because surprise can imply both a happy feel and not so happy feel. But disruption is really, it can be compared to not a pleasing aesthetic experience but still an aesthetic experience that has cognitive significance. Say, not every artwork as well will produce pleasure or pleasing surprise. But sometimes the disruption is quite unpleasant. Lots of artworks confront us with notions that we are not necessarily very happy to engage with, but it's worth it. When the artwork is well done, it's a worthy engagement because it interrogates you in a productive way. I think similarly with the experiment as well.

(break)

You're listening to Beauty at Work.

Brandon: Is beauty still the best term for this, then? I would understand beauty in the design, elegant design where you're trying to, say, minimize the number of possible intervening variables. Then we would say that I'm trying to design a beautiful experiment that's really elegant. Would you also consider this aspect of significance under the category of beauty, or is it a different kind of aesthetic experience? How would you talk about that?

Milena: I take it that the aesthetic experience can be very diverse. It can be disruptive and pleasant or a sublime experience somewhere in the middle. But I also find that the concept of functionality and beauty can do a good job in telling us how those diverse experiences relate. Because we ultimately can appreciate how the artists or the scientists delivered those responses in us, and how the setup basically enabled the delivery of those responses via the result that it had.

I think thinking about beauty in that way can still be used in a productive way. But we need to appreciate that not every experience in science will have the happy feel to it. We usually think about beauty as a more straightforward, I guess, response that we have, that some of them are more complex and demanding responses.

Brandon: Thank you. Some scholars have argued that beauty can be a source of bias, at least in scientific theories. Is this a concern in experimentation at all?

Milena: It's not my concern so far, simply because I think I'm staying at a much more basic level of analysis. I'm not thinking about the big questions. At this stage, I'm really wanting to understand how aesthetic judgment entered in the construction of an experiment, the selection of the experimental setup, the evaluation of the results. I want to understand that practice.

I'm not asking the big questions, but I have asked them in the past. I'm interested in this question. I think Sabine Hossenfelder, who published this really fascinating work, Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, I think she raises some really important questions. I find myself in a lot of agreement with these arguments. Because she highlights something very important, that sometimes when you have values, they can function very well. They can be well-motivated. But sometimes we don't examine those values. They might start not aligning with our goals. So, maybe they can start clashing with other values that we have. So, we need to interrogate and examine the values that are operating. I think, in that sense, she's asking something really important. I wouldn't think that that question doesn't apply really well in scientific experimentation as well.

In any field, I think, you have to ask those questions. Why do I have preference for these particular features? What do they give me? Are these features aligning with these values? Are they aligning with other values that I have? In her work, of course, she's arguing that, currently, the beauty ideal is not aligning with some other values that perhaps are much more important. I think that's a really good question to ask at all times.

Brandon: Yeah, I suppose, as I'm trying to think about designing an elegant experiment, I find it hard to imagine an objection to that. In the same way with the question of an elegant theory, or like this equation is really elegant so therefore, we should invest billions of euros. That seems a bit different, right? I don't know. What do you think? Do you think that aspect of elegance in experimental design could be immune to this critique?

Milena: I think there is something to this. Because at the end of the day, who wants to have an overcomplicated experimental setup that no one can replicate or that increases the chances of error? We don't want that. We also want to have a recipe other people can follow. We want to have a recipe that we can communicate with students.

In that sense, I think perhaps more immune in the context of experimental setup, at the idea of optimality and simplicity. I guess, elegance, more generally. I think they're really important factors that ultimately just speaking about operational simplicity and functionality, being quite central, ultimately, to us as cognitive agents that need certain ways of operating with the setup and have some limitations. Of course, we want those features to be part of our experiments. So, I think perhaps the notion of functional beauty survives that objection.

Brandon: Well, let's talk a little bit about significance more personally. What is in your inquiry? I guess, how has it impacted you? Is there anything from this work that you found beautiful?

Milena: Oh, I am constantly looking at images or experimental setup that scientists are producing from different fields. I'm feeling very inspired. I did not expect this. When I started studying philosophy and history of science, I had two years of training in different sciences. I used to think, why am I not doing science then? Why am I proceeding to do philosophy rather than proceeding to cognitive science, or physics, or mathematics? I used to think, well, I don't want to just be learning facts. I want to know how these were derived. I want to know about the process. That's what I found really fascinating and very rewarding.

Now I understand, of course, that aspect is very much recognized by scientists themselves. People are really happy to talk about their creativity and how so many scientists talk to us about how they feel cultivating their creativity, and doing fine arts, or whatever is really integral to them, thinking about themselves as good scientists. Those have been very rewarding, pleasing experiences for me. Because I think my idea of starting my education was very different. I used to think, well, it's just about learning facts. There's nothing about values in here. It's definitely just appreciating this aspect.

I think it's beautiful, because you get to learn about how science is produced, the human factor, the values and the motivations of individuals that then form communities, and then make important discoveries. All of that is really, really beautiful to me. It just feels very rewarding. That's what I like reading about instead of novels, to be honest.

Brandon: That's great. That really resonates with my experience of talking to scientists. I mean, the same kind of discovery that you're describing, I think, but in better words than I can put. It's really what I find really pleasing, beautiful, in these encounters with the scientists I've been interviewing over the last couple of years, and seeing their responses to surveys and so on. It's been really quite exciting.

Tell us, what are you hoping your readers would learn from this work you're writing now, a book on beauty in experiments? You've written quite a bit on this in your journal articles? What do you want your readers to take away? How might understanding these aesthetic, dimensions of experiments be helpful for scientists and even for philosophers?

Milena: Yes, well, if I had to think specifically about scientists, what I would like scientists to take away from this work — it's kind of intimidating for philosophers to think scientists engaged with their work. But I do know that they do engage because they write to me and say how much they liked thinking about this. It's actually really rewarding to think that by reading — I wrote even a few popularizing articles about this just to reach more readership. I see that when scientists write about reading this particular work, they acknowledge that sometimes they had not thought about it. They just pursue their work, and they focus on the problems that they're solving. They don't think so explicitly that they make aesthetic judgments or that the aesthetic sensibility matters in what they're doing. But that is actually very important to them, and it actually matters.

I think if I can help in bringing to the surface that aspect of scientific practice — make it more visible, more studied, and that people are more aware of these important factors — I think it will be really important for scientists to talk more about this aspect. Because we do have this sometimes really unhelpful way of thinking about science, as it's like an algorithm size product of following rules. We think about anything arts and humanities as less important. We have sometimes attacked on those fields, saying, well, only fun stem research. I think this is so important to acknowledge the integration and the interaction between these fields, and that philosophical work can help identify values at play. It also can identify what is special about science.

This is one of the first things we do in philosophy of science. What makes science science? What is it that it's special about? How does it demarcate from other activities? We usually want to say, well, it's about this strict evaluation of evidence and methods. We want to understand that most of the science is also done by human beings, and they have the interests and values. Understanding those values, where they come from, why they're there, how they operate, exploring them, analyzing them, bringing it to the surface and making them more explicit, basically. We know that bias can be bad when it's implicit. But when you explicitly identify your values, then they can be examined, interrogated, and corrected for you. They actually may be coming into friction with other values. So, I think that's really important. I hope that's something that we can have more discussions about.

When it comes to philosophers, however, I hope that more people will start paying attention to aesthetics in science. Because one of the reasons why I didn't do this topic as a PhD student is because I used to think, well, no one would take this seriously. It was not really a topic that was very discussed. I felt like it was not a legitimate question to pause it there. The more I was learning, I was realizing that's actually not true. That's not true. I should have been more brave about my choices. We can learn so much by thinking about experiments, answering those big picture questions.

Some people in philosophy of science have argued that beauty is a concept that constantly evolves and changes in its dynamic and revolutionary. We can understand change in science as change that is actually driven by aesthetic changes. Well, the most obvious thing to us now is, this work is very much grounded in theorizing theoretical changes. What about scientific practice? When we think about the experiment, do we find such revolutions? Do we find those revolutions aligning with theoretical revolutions? I think I've already alluded enough to the answer, that perhaps not so much.

So, this is something that I hope philosophers will engage more with, when we start thinking about scientific practice. What do we learn about the involvement of these aesthetic judgments, how they're operating, and how they ultimately will lead us to answering the big questions in a different manner? Also, just recognize the role we pay to the aesthetic sensibility in science and how we understand discovery. I think more attention needs to be paid now into discovery once we're moving also into very new ways of discovering, where it's not only humans that discover.

Brandon: Finally, for those of us who are not scientists or philosophers, what might be some of the implications of your work? Should we be thinking about science or scientists in a different way? Should the public, from your work, revise their understanding of scientists in some way? Beyond the context of science, should we pay attention to certain aspects of beauty in our work, whatever fields we're in, that we may not be paying attention to?

Milena: How would our ideas about science change when we think about this aspect? I think, perhaps not so much and perhaps a lot, if we think about some old-fashioned ideas of how we think about science as something that follows rules. We think of scientists as it's just about following an algorithm here. You just obtain evidence, update your hypothesis, and that's it.

If we have that idea of science, then yes, we're going to learn a lot. We'll have to revise our ways of thinking. But I do think that in the last few years, at least in the philosophy of science, we have been recognizing more and more that science is value-laden. Of course, it is value-laden given that it's practiced by individuals, human beings that have certain cognitive capacities or certain embodied experience. Of course, science will have values, will impact in the questions that we ask and the answers that we have. But there are a lot of developments in social epistemology that give us really sophisticated answers as to why science continues to be very special in light of these factors about human values.

Let's think about the arrangement of scientists. Scientists are arranged in groups that have self-correcting mechanisms. We can start thinking about, also, if we're worried about the involvement of beauty in science, we can think about the fact that there are still self-correcting mechanisms in science that can identify whether we are driven by values that perhaps are not aligning with other goals and values that we have, or whether the values are well fit for purpose.

So, it depends on what kind of preconception you have, how sophisticated your conception about science, and how it works is. But if one thing is all about rule following, and there's no place for personal judgment, well, definitely looking into this ethics of science, we're going to see that that's definitely not the case. There is a lot of judgment.

Scientists recognize this when we have great mathematicians and physicists talking about their discoveries, and often are recognizing the personal factors. They're emphasizing what was the problematization around the time that they had. Sometimes it has to do with their own life and their own jobs. The fact that they have this aesthetic sensibility, well-trained aesthetic intuition, they would say that made them select particular ways of thinking and led them to the discovery. That's really important on how we can enrich perhaps our activities by thinking about beauty in science.

I think there is something to be said about the fact that beauty enables and facilitates effective communication of ideas. Out of practicality, I think it's nice when you have neat ideas, neat writing, or very elegant ways to present slideshows and using visuals. I find that, as an educator, I pay a lot of attention to have very lovely-looking slides and showing my students beautiful images of instruments or scientific images. There is something to be said about how much that affects one's ability to process information. No one wants to look at messiness. It takes longer to analyze complex, not well-written, and not well-presented information.

There's, of course, evidence for this from cognitive psychology, this studying to fluency processing. This fluency processing and how beauty is this experience of when things fit into pre-established frameworks. It's just faster processing on our behalf. We will understand this faster if it has these features we perceive as beautiful. I think there's something to be said about trying to communicate ideas in an elegant manner. It's just practically easier for people to follow us, I think.

Brandon: That's fantastic. Yeah, I think you're right. I think it's really crucial for us to think about elegance in the various things we're designing and communicating the world. What is it that we're trying to do? How might we do that more elegantly so that we could, I think, be more effective in whatever we're trying to do, it would seem?

With scientists, I think one of the things that I've been wondering about is whether this work that's being done — that you're doing, that my team and I are doing — whether that could help in some way to improve public trust in scientists. A lot of the research suggests that the mistrust of scientists comes not from a mistrust of science per se, but a skepticism about the morality of scientists. It's something about, at least in the United States, the research suggests that there's some kind of skepticism that scientists are not trustworthy. You'd said earlier that beauty is a feature of trustworthiness. I wonder if there's something there that we could harness, if there was some way perhaps for the public to better access the aesthetic experiences of scientists, to share in those experiences. I wonder if that might help. I don't know what that would take. I suppose, in a way, maybe people like Boyle were trying to do that back in the day, 350 years ago. But Hobbs was very skeptical. I think a lot of scientists today are skeptical that, would people who even observe the same experiment interpret it in the same way, even if they're seeing the same things, when there are political priors, or there are agendas, or confirmation bias affect things?

I wonder whether it's not so much — the beauty of the results, but the beauty of the design or appreciating some other aesthetic aspects of what scientists do, even developing a taste for the same values, a taste for the aesthetic of discovery, or insight, or understanding? Would that have any traction do you think in improving public trust in science?

Milena: That's a really interesting question. I really continuously think about it. Yes, in light of the sad times that we're living in, when there's so much misinformation and mistrust towards science and scientific results, you cannot avoid not noticing it and feeling really disappointed that at the end of the day, there isn't as effective communication between scientific community and public for whatever reason. Often, it's not the scientist to be blamed for this, of course. But what can we do to do the job better?

If we see beauty as just another value in the family of many values that drive scientists in pursuits, and in ways of they justify their ideas, you can be skeptical. That's absolutely fine. But there are other ways to justify as to what makes science very special. That is the self-correcting mechanism I was talking about. Scientists do correct their ideas. They are responsive to evidence. We don't hide away from evidence, right? They're not going to trust you if you continuously discard someone's research that doesn't speak in favor of your ideas. There is a public aspect to science. There is the communal aspect to science. There are so many different features of the organization.

One of my favorite posts is Helen Longino, has talked about this a lot — the structures in the community that are self-correcting, that ultimately facilitate for critical evaluation of where scientists are going and how well, basically, they're achieving goals. Ultimately, recognizing that even if you attack the idea that scientists are objective individually, as an individual agent, you can have objectivity of communities because of these self-regulating mechanisms that are definitely not the features of the scientific activities, for instance.

There's one way to think about it. It doesn't have to undermine the integrity of science to acknowledge the personal factors that are operating. Okay. Maybe sometimes beauty is really well justified as a pursuit in scientific theories. Sometimes it can lead to stagnation or simply what Hossenfelder argues. But one of the things that she's doing is prompting discourse and opening a debate. Now everyone is debating it. It's taken seriously. That objection is taken seriously. That's important to acknowledge. Say, if we perceive that these are subjective factors, which I think we can question that. We said enough today, I think, to make us think that there are some well-established ways to think about beauty that are agreed upon. But even if we take it at all, well, people can disagree about what's beautiful, and whether this should affect pursuits or not. We can still appreciate that we can debate this. We can analyze it, identify if it's operating the way that this may be coming into friction with other ideas that we have and other values that we have.

In that sense, I hope people are understanding those facts about science are really important. Subjectivity of individuals doesn't have to mean we don't trust scientists. There is other features we can focus on to understand why science is special in delivering knowledge about the world, understanding, and definitely where we want to go following public policy and things like that.

Can we improve scientific understanding by thinking about the aesthetics of science? I think, certainly, it helps a lot thinking about these very interesting features about scientists, that they are, at the end of the day, like everyone else wanting to find out how the world works. They want to find out how to cure a disease or how to deliver products that help humanity advance. Everyone is interested in how this ability works. How is it that some people were just so good at this stuff, coming up with these new ideas? What did they do? What was so special about them?

There's so much recent discussion about the role of the creativity in the imagination of scientific discovery. It's really fascinating now that we are thinking more and more about the future science and what discovery looks like today, to see how it turning suddenly and valuing more the human creator, the human discoverer.

Now that they're seeing how there is negative associations the public has with AI-generated art and scientific discoveries and results. Suddenly, more than ever, we pay attention to the creator of the discovery for their ability to have aesthetic sensibility, and the ability to feel their way through the motivation and the selection of the optimal experimental design.

We don't understand how AI makes discoveries, but it does. But we don't feel like it's all there by just getting an answer. I want to know how this happened. I think it's opening really productive now. They mentioned to explore human creativity, the role of these accessibility now, discoveries, and to analyze the future of discovery. More and more, we're going to have automation in our discoveries. So, we want to understand further what's special about the human discoverer. Are we overcoming some limitations by automating, or is it integral ultimately to achieving and understanding that we have a human agent navigating the discovery process?

I think these are, hopefully, questions that are going to fascinate more the public. Perhaps by seeing these kinds of negative reactions so far from the studies that I've seen, maybe more and more, the human scientists who have become valued for those aspects that are perceived sometimes in a negative light will be considered to be subjective.

Brandon: Right. Brilliant. Milena Ivanova, thank you so much for joining us. We'll provide some links to your work and other references in our show notes, so our listeners can follow up on all this. So, thanks so much again.

Milena: Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure.

(Outro)

Brandon: Everyone, thanks for listening to this episode of Beauty at Work. Please be sure to check out the show notes for more resources from our guest. I hope you really enjoyed this episode. If you like the show, please be sure to share this episode with your friends. Also, please subscribe to our podcast and leave us a five-star review. It really helps us out. Music for this show was provided by Venkat Subramanyam, and the podcast was edited by Dave Visaya from Podcast Engineers. This season of Beauty at Work is sponsored by Templeton Religion Trust as part of a grant on the aesthetic dimensions of science. To learn more about this project, please visit wellbeinginscience.com. Also, for the broader project on Beauty at Work, please visit beautyatwork.net.