“Brilliant Blunders: Colossal Mistakes by Great Scientists That Changed Our Understanding of Life and the Universe, by Mario Livio. It happens to be very relevant to this particular chapter of your book. An earlier book by Livio, The Accelerating Universe, is about what makes a theory beautiful to scientists (and thus attractive). He believes the criteria are: - Simplicity; as much can be explained in as few laws as possible. So as Aristotle added new circles to his diagram, his theory became less beautiful. I think there is little controversy about this; and I believe mathematicians also value such simplicity. The third criteria is "symmetry". However, Livio's second criteria for "beauty" is fascinating, because it's not so much an impartial value (like simplicity) but a direct reflection of the existing paradigm, and a case study of the dominant paradigm. Livio calls it the "Copernican principle". The following is a quote from page 25 of "Brilliant Blunders" in a chapter about Darwin and evolution: "Theories that obey the Copernican principle do not require humans to occupy any special place for these theories to work. Copernicus taught us that the earth is not at the center of the solar system, and all the subsequent findings in astronomy have only strengthened our realization that, from a physics perspective, humans play no special role in the cosmos. We live on a tiny planet that revolves around an ordinary star, in a galaxy that contains hundreds of billions of similar stars. Our physical insignificance continues even further. Not only are there about two hundred billion galaxies in our observable universe, but even ordinary matter - the stuff that we and all the stars and gas in all the galaxies are made of - constitutes a little over 4 percent of the universe's energy budget. In other words, we are really nothing special." ”
