Great scientists follow intuition and beauty, not rationality

Great scientists follow intuition and beauty, not rationality

Erik Hoel

The unreasonable effectiveness of aesthetics in science

A play on Wigner's essay, The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences. Hoel is definitely a skeptic on the paranormal, as can be seen by his (unfair, IMO) criticism of Josephson at the beginning of this essay. But I think there's a still a lot of good stuff in his writings and I don't believe proponents get anywhere by sticking to their own tight, small circle of Psi/Survival acceptance - especially since we know you have people on "our side" who accept Psi *or* Survival but not both...

So that said, I thought the comparison between Von Neumann & Einstein was quite interesting:

...But von Neumann himself? He felt he lacked a certain quality as a scientist. Here’s from a profile in The New Republic:

In his work… von Neumann never had strokes of irrational intuition, the kind that result in startling new ideas; his friend Einstein had many, and von Neumann envied them.

He understood that there was not just one thing, rationality, that describes good thought. If that were true, scientists should be immaculately rational...Tellingly, von Neumann supposedly blamed himself for missing out on a number of fundamental insights (incompleteness, the Dirac operator, etc) in the many fields he touched, despite being close every time.

Meanwhile, Special Relativity was just that, special. ..To everyone else, it seemed as if Einstein had somehow plucked an idea from the gods and put it into human hands. Really, he had plucked it from some sort of netherworld of pre-scientific intuition.
Scientists are not big spheres of rationality. They are spiky and make use of intuition and aesthetics...

..For despite the best efforts by philosophers and scientists, there is still no clear solution to what's called the demarcation problem..

Note this relation of science (and math) to beauty is also covered in the interviews at Why Are We Here? conducted by physicist Ard Louis and film-maker David Malone.