“After a certain high level of technical skill is achieved,” Albert Einstein famously remarked, “science and art tend to coalesce in aesthetics, plasticity, and form.”
I’ve long believed he was right. I can point to many moments in my career as a theoretical physicist when I’ve been guided as much by aesthetic intuition in engaging our deepest dilemmas about the behavior of subatomic particles, space, time, and the nature of reality, as I have been by mathematical logic. Aesthetics is always present in theoretical physics, in sometimes inarticulable and undepictable ways. But never have the mathematical and aesthetic aspects of my work found such striking synthesis as in the geometric objects that my colleagues and I came to call “adinkras.”