The Aesthetic Turn in Physics: 5 Coordination Without Meaning

Aesthetic criteria operate not only as individual judgments but as social and institutional stabilisers. Beauty, elegance, and simplicity coordinate the activities of research communities, allocate resources, and reinforce credibility — all without engaging meaningfully with the phenomena under study.

These criteria allow communities to converge on preferred lines of research, create shared standards of evaluation, and maintain coherence across complex theoretical landscapes. The effect is structural: the aesthetic turn organizes attention, shapes discourse, and consolidates authority, without epistemic guarantee.

Importantly, aesthetic coordination is not meaningless in a trivial sense. It serves a purpose: stabilizing research programs, guiding methodological choices, and reinforcing collective standards. Yet these functions are social and procedural, not semiotic. They do not ensure that the theory instantiated phenomena or predicted events; they ensure that the community remains aligned around preferred models.

This dynamic mirrors surrogate mechanisms in predictive drift and explanatory substitution. Structural legitimacy is maintained internally, while external engagement — the relational cut with the world — is mediated or deferred. The aesthetic turn exemplifies how communities sustain authority, coherence, and continuity without meaning-bearing assurance, reinforcing the patterns we have observed across theoretical practice.

The final part will consider the broader implications of this structural substitution, showing how the aesthetic turn reshapes theory evaluation, program selection, and the perception of epistemic success.