Jim Holt thinks “the universe is more ugly than it is beautiful”:
[T]he form we can expect reality to take at its most general level is that of an infinite, incomplete mediocre mess. The laws of physics are not particularly elegant. The ingredients of the universe show no aesthetic parsimony. There are 60 odd elementary particles. That’s way more than is necessary. If the universe is created by a God it’s a God with no sense of economy or elegance.
He also responds to the idea that beauty is “the mystery of life”:
I think the delight one experiences in grasping a truth is the same sort of delight that’s elicited by beauty. I hate to make the hoary old distinction between the beautiful and the sublime but I think that things that are deeply mysterious don’t appeal to me. I’m irritated by mystery. It’s a temperamental thing. I know some people love it. So the day is beautiful and the night is sublime, as Kant said fatuously in one of his early works. The day is flooded with sunlight and everything is crisp and clear in its contours whereas the night is obscurity with these pinpricks of light that are stars. In the extremely unlikely event that all cosmic mystery is somehow dissolved, I don’t think that will destroy my aesthetic appreciation of the cosmos, but then I don’t think the cosmos is an aesthetically satisfying object as a whole. It’s a botched job! I think we should send it back and get a new one!
Last year the Dish had Jim on as an Ask Anything guest – watch those videos here.
The Dish 