Influence of aesthetic ideas in physics

The Birth of Venus by Botticelli

In a previous post I reviewed the new book in Spanish by Francisco José Soler Gil, entitled The enigma of the natural order. Its third chapter, whose title is Aesthetic ideas in physics, which reproduces a lecture given by the author at the Faculty of Chemistry of the University of Seville, has provided me with matter for this post in my blog.

The influence on physics of aesthetic ideas is very old, perhaps as old as physics. One of its oldest precursors is Pythagoras, who proposed the concept of the harmony of the celestial spheres, according to which the distances between the planets would reproduce harmonious musical intervals.

Can there be life without the weak interaction?

Beta and neutron decay

On January 30, 2018, the Science News magazine commented on an article recently published in arXiv which states that in a universe without the weak interaction, life would still be possible. When I read the Science News article, I immediately thought of an objection that could ruin both the thesis of the original article and its popularization. The first thing I did was looking up the original article, to see if my objection was mentioned or denied, but there was not a word about it. Next I detailed my objection in a comment in the web version of the Science News article, but so far no one has answered me. However, I think the objection is quite strong, and unless I am answered satisfactorily, in my opinion these articles are discredited.

According to the standard cosmological model and the standard model of particle physics, there are four fundamental interactions or forces in the universe: gravitation, electromagnetic interaction, and the strong and weak interactions, which regulate the work of atoms and elementary particles. In particular, the weak interaction affects all the elementary particles: leptons and hadrons, unlike the strong interaction, which affects only hadrons.