The 4 Cs of Physics

Sabrine Hossenfelder has a post about why physics is not about beauty although many physicists may think so

And I can’t blame them. Because nothing else is happening on this planet. There’s just me and my attempt to convince physicists that beauty isn’t truth.

Nature has no obligation to be pretty, that much is sure. But the truth seems hard to swallow. “Certainly she doesn’t mean that,” they say. Or “She doesn’t know what she’s doing.” Then they explain things to me. Because surely I didn’t mean to say that much of what goes on in the foundations of physics these days is a waste of time, did I? And even if, could I please not do this publicly, because some people have to earn a living from it.

Now Eli does not disagree with this, nor with the Capitalist Imperialist Pig who is on a Greek Philosopher Beauty and Truth kick, but Eli does want to engage with a challenge that the Pig threw down at Back Reaction

Beauty may be an unreliable heuristic, but the challenge for the doubter is to come up with something better - I mean something that works.

This was not well received by the host

I also don't know why you or CIP or anyone else thinks it's my task to come up with something to replace criteria from beauty. I am pointing out using them is bad scientific practice, and that's that. If people who use them cannot come up with anything better, maybe they shouldn't be scientists. I don't know why I should give them something else to do.

 Eli suggested something else and the Bunny would like to discuss it here, especially as his responses appear to have issues getting through there besides which he could use the hits and values the occasional intelligent comment.

It ties back to discussions ongoing where science is under attack, the existence of a consensus and why such a consensus exists.  The sorely missed Andy Skuce had a nice post and Michael Tobis has always skillfully parsed that problem. Eli has also played in the sandbox, most recently pointing out that the consensus is created by a coherent and consilient set of models or three Cs

By this is meant that the theory does not contradict itself, that it explains a great deal, both of the observations as well as extending beyond the immediate issue under consideration.  To this Eli wants to add another C, concise.

Especially for physics, concise takes the place of beauty.  Valued physics theories are concise, they may not necessarily be simple, in the spirit of Einstein's

It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.

After all, ask mom or dad what a LaPlace operator or a Hamiltonian is (no coaching and no moms or dads who are professors of physics), but concise is a good description, terse also, but terse starts with a t.

Engineering does not much like concise, it is much more concerned with precise.  The value of everything is important, the meaning less so or sometimes not at all.  Computers have made this tendency worse.  Chemistry is, with difficulty moving from moleculat engineering to first principles.  Computers have enabled this  Climate science from stamp collecting to calculation with complex models. 

Physics values precision as a secondary issue, but it is focused on understanding and understanding requires a small number of general principles from which precision flows with added complication. 

So truth is not beauty, but it is a creature of a few symbols and a modicum of words explaining much.