The text presents the view of the Polish physicist Grzegorz Białkowski on using aesthetic criteria in the practice of science, first of all in the practice of physics. Białobrzeski claims—along with Henri Poincaré, Werner Heisenberg and Paul Dirac— that aesthetic criteria are present in the creating and assessing of scientific theories; he also searches for a justification of referring to these criteria. He also draws attention to the role of aesthetic experience in scientific activity. He justifies the presence of aesthetic criteria in physics as part of his naturalistic attitude.

This article analyses one of the trials aiming to bridge the incommensurability gap between special relativity and quantum mechanics in the form of postulating the quantum principle of relativity. The postulate is argued here to be rather a conventionalist stratagem than a new paradigm in theoretical physics. It is worth emphasising this claim does not assess the scientific value of the analysed work at all. Moreover, I draw attention to favouring both the mathematical instrumentalism and the ontic character of probability in the article in question.

In the first part of the article, I reconstruct the philosophical thoughts of Czesław Białobrzeski, a Polish philosophizing physicist. In the second part, I outline his biography and contribution to the development of physics. Philosophical reflections of Białobrzeski formed based on the leading issues in physics of the late 19th and mainly 20th century. He carried out his considerations in close connection to his scientific practice. The activity of the Polish scientist takes place in the formation and development period of quantum mechanics. Białobrzeski, similarly to many other physicists of the time, was well aware of the necessity of coherent explanation of the fundamentally new phenomena of the quantum mechanics. His take on the subject is rather original—he referred to the classical, philosophical theory of categories and proposed its ontological interpretation.