Non sequitur

[supergee]

Locus is bringing back its Roundtable, which is a Good Thing. We have a discussion of sf aesthetics, which starts with

The physicist Paul Dirac suggested that for an equation to be true, it must be beautiful. In Dirac’s thinking beauty was a way of discerning the truth, as much a part of the scientific process as observation. If science fiction is a way of reaching for the truth, then shouldn’t it also be beautiful? Can a work of science fiction really have anything true to say, if it fails by the standards of fiction?

But what makes fiction beautiful? For me, the great strength of prose fiction is its ability to step inside the human experience. To explore the internal world that exists inside us all. When science fiction is beautiful it is most often because, however strange the external world it explores, its first concern is with the internal experience of that world.

But of course the area Dirac was talking about, where beauty is truth, and truth beauty and that's all that's on the final is mathematical physics, which is precisely where human experience is irrelevant. Bring in human experience, and the two diverge.