This question does not relate to philosophical romanticism applied to science that had some currency in the 1800s. Roughly it seems that scientific romanticism differed from enlightenment by inserting humanity into nature and seeking union via human consciousness and problem solving.
The romantic aspect of physics I allude to shares some features of the medieval tale relating to chivalry, such as Don Quixote and qualities of adventure into unknown parts remote from settled life, such as the adventures of Richard Burton, who translated the Arabian Nights.
The mystery is: how has nature contrived these things we observe?
The remoteness is that the answers may require extrapolation in size, microscopic or cosmological, or in length of time, short or long, or in eons past or yet to arrive, remote from human experience, or principles that defy and challenge human perception, such as universal gravitation, or the nature of time, curvature of space, or quantum particles.
The adventure involves all the steps to solve the problem.
It seems to me that theoretical physics is a romantic quest. If the physicist arrives at a partial or provisional understanding of some mystery, then that is a great romance.
Your view?
Yes, I do agree to your observation. When physics leaves the experimental method, it is becoming romantic, either in formulating mathematical beauty or aesthetic texts. Such is the poetic consciousness of our physical universe, which is still a concealed mystery of dead and living matter.
On the contrary: Physics and science, more generally, are impersonal subjects, since their content doesn't depend on personal opinions and can be checked and learned and understood by anyone in an impersonal way. That, indeed, is how ``humanity'' is involved in understanding nature.
The sociology of physics is independent of its technical content. Non-scientists tend to focus on the sociology, but that's the least interesting part of the subject, since it doesn't deal with the technical part, but with the social part.
How an idea gets accepted by a community is sociology and does depend on personal issues; the technical content of the idea is not. The difference was understood, already, in Antiquity-cf. Plato's dialog ``Gorgias''.
Yes. In the sense, theoretical physics can take you to a plane ! that is away from worldly matters ! with associated intense involvement and joy.
It is, in the sense that it aims – and to some extent succeeds - to bridge the gap between the abstract mathematics and the perceivable-only-by-senses nature.
Of course, this is the scope of all physical and biological sciences, but only theoretical physics has such a high degree of exactness that is comparable to that of mathematics.
Perhaps I'm not answering this in the exact framing that the question intends, but I think the romance of theoretical physics primarily lies at the boundary between what has already been brought out in the light (what is established/known) and what still lies in the darkness (what is not yet known or fully understood).
Bringing something forward out of that darkness gives us that special moment when the complexity and beauty of nature feels like something we can grasp in our own hands-- like there's a part of the universe around us that we can hold onto in our individual mind. That's a very awesome and empowering feeling.
As a separate point, I think part of the romance of physics for us as individuals is that when one brings forward something new, one has the opportunity to interpret it according to one's own way of viewing the world. That has the potential to color how others will view those ideas for many years onwards. (For example, Dirac notation and Feynman diagrams will color quantum theory for many years to come, although there is no reason it absolutely has to be done that way.) I think there is a kind of poetry in that interpretation and notational description.
Savannah Garmon:
I particularly liked your statement: `That has the potential to color how others will view those ideas for many years onwards.’
So, for a new concept or for a new way of looking at things, the pleasure of finding things out (cribbing Feynman) is individual, but the new concept or point of view is also at the same time networked to humanity. Discovery is both singular (individual) and universal (for everyone). Whoever achieves that in life is privileged.
I understand your question, but it yet may be valuable to review the past.
https://www.sunypress.edu/p-3750-romantic-science.aspx
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2921-5
The question is opposite to our real life,everything has its two sides.Everyone has his real life,so on the opposite side,my answer is definitely yes.
The real romance of theoretical physics lies in the arms of mathematical formulas. Let me explain to you, Sir. When you have a new theory to apply to the real world, it looks beautiful. Adding formulas to the theory lets you predict future outcomes. And there is nothing more romantic than predicting the modes of nature you love.
Theoretical physics is definitely romantic.
Google translates Fathi Mohammed reply as
It depends on which angle you look at the topic. Why not? It may be
Economist May 2nd, 2020 edition article: Through crack and crag Joe Brown died on April 15th The colossus of British rock-climbing was 89
“He wasn’t one for sticking flags on mountains. The point was working out an untrodden route, the trickier the better.”
How To Choose a Good Scientific Problem
By Uri Alon. Molecular Cell
Volume 35, Issue 6, 24 September 2009, Pages 726-728
doi.org/10.1016/j.molcel.2009.09.013
From the article: "In this second schema, the meandering of research is seen as an integral part of our craft, rather than a nuisance. The mentors' task is to support students through the cloud that seems to guard the entry into the unknown."
and
"Sailing into the unknown again and again takes courage ..."
A quote from Gotthold Lessing following pertains to the quest for a solution to a problem in theoretical physics.
Often mentioned is Einstein’s paraphrase of Gotthold Lessing, "The search for truth is more precious than its possession." For example, in Einstein on Einstein, by Hanoch Gutfreund & Jürgen Renn, Princeton Univ. Press (2020).
Einstein's paraphrase is based on a longer passage, in German, in Lessing’s book Eine Duplik (A Duplicate). English translations of the passage appear in some biographies of Lessing.
For example: in Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, by Helen Zimmern, Longmans, Green 1878, at page 361:
' Not the truth in whose possession a man is or believes himself to be, but the earnest efforts which he has made to attain truth, make the worth of the man. For it is not through the possession but through the search for truth that his powers are strengthened, in which alone his ever-growing perfection exists. Possession makes him calm, indolent, proud—' If God held all truth in His right hand, and in His left the ever-living desire for truth, although with the condition that I should remain in error for ever, and if He said to me "Choose," I should humbly incline towards His left, and say, "Father, give ; pure truth is for Thee alone." '
Yes! Absolutely it is but I would like to change your romantic word to enthusiastic word. Because, Physics itself not enthusiastic when you don't know mathematics. I think mathematics is the only way, we can feel & see physics around us. Beauty of physics lies in mathematics.
Gino Segre: Ordinary Geniuses, 2011, page xv of Introduction:
``There is sort of romance in science similar to what appears in other walks of life. It centers on setting out for a new frontier after the hero or heroine has seemed to achieve his or her goals. .... There is the added risk that the trip may be fruitless...’‘
The fundamental reality is that the Hero (the researcher) and 'Theoretical Physics' are always loyally together in good and bad times.
James Hopwood Jeans, at page 338 of The Universe Around Us, 1929 Cambridge University Press:
`... the thrill of pleasure of the pioneer who opens up new realms of knowledge ...'
Yes, I do agree to your observation. When physics leaves the experimental method, it is becoming romantic, either in formulating mathematical beauty or aesthetic texts. Such is the poetic consciousness of our physical universe, which is still a concealed mystery of dead and living matter.
Person-environment-occupation combination along with nature have been always fascinating and dynamic.
Compare this remark in the Preface to
The Art and Craft of Problem Solving, Second edition, 2007, by Paul Zeitz:
The problem solver climbs to the top of mountains, sees hitherto undreamed of vistas.
to the passage mentioned in the May 5 2020 reply above:
Economist May 2nd, 2020 edition article: Through crack and crag Joe Brown died on April 15th The colossus of British rock-climbing was 89 “He wasn’t one for sticking flags on mountains. The point was working out an untrodden route, the trickier the better.”
The athletic company Nike in 1997 hired basketball player Michael Jordan for a television ad called Failure. The ad was written by Jamie Barrett. The ad can be found on youtube in a few locations. Here is what Michael Jordan said in the ad:
I've missed more than 9,000 shots in my career/ I've lost almost 300 games/ 26 times I've been trusted to take the game winning shot/ and missed./ I've failed over, and over and over again in my life./ And that is why/ I succeed.
Here is an article that mentions the ad:
https://www.businessinsider.com/25-nike-ads-that-shaped-the-brands-history-2013-8#i-am-not-a-role-model-1993-5
Comment: Along the way to trying to solve a problem in physics, in a quest that might be characterized as romantic as the question above suggests, persistence plays an indispensable role. A theoretical physicist does not climb a conceptual physics mountain without some failures along the way.
From obituary for Harry Suhl, physicist,
in Physics Today 73, 12, 64 (2020); https://doi.org/10.1063/PT.3.4641, December 1, 2020 issue,
By Daniel Arovas and M. Brian Maple JollaPradeep Kumar
They wrote the following about Suhl, which relates to the romance of exploration of ideas, and venturing (in physics) into the unknown:
Harry offered the following “unwelcome advice to the younger people”: “Above all, don’t get wiser as you get older. If you do, you will become too inhibited to try the impossible, and one can achieve the limits of the possible only by occasionally venturing beyond them. The famous proverb should really be transposed: Angels rush in where fools fear to tread.”
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