The beauty in the universe that physicists seek and see is an illusory consequence of our human mathematics. The world is asymmetric and imperfect: it's time for an aesthetic revolution in physics, writes Marcelo Gleiser.

What is beauty? The poet John Keats, in his Ode on a Grecian Urn, responded with his enigmatic ‘“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,”—that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’ Although there isn’t agreement among scholars about the poet’s intentions in writing these lines, in scientific circles they came to signify a general epigraph for a Platonic take on Nature: that beauty, understood as mathematical symmetry and proportion, is the pathway to the truth, that is, to our final unveiling of Nature’s deepest secrets. I am here to argue against this belief—for it is a belief—from bottom up.

Let’s start with Plato. He distrusted the senses. To him, to base our understanding of the world on what our senses can capture of it is a sure path to delusion. To find truth we must dive into the world of ideas, of undistilled reason. In his famous Allegory of the Cave, he imagined a group of slaves chained and immobilized in such a way that all they could do since birth was to watch shadows dancing on the cave wall ahead of them. An Ancient Greece take on binging on movies. To these slaves, Plato argued, reality was what they saw on the wall, as that was the only facet of the world they had access to. They couldn’t know that a roaring fire burned behind them, and people held objects in front of it to project shadows on the cave wall. The slave’s reality was massive staging of fake news.