Beauty and Science

I knew Edgar Allan Poe to be a writer. But I didn’t know he even wrote sonnets. The lines from one of his sonnets even became famous! Calling science a “cold philosophy”, his sonnet feared science would “conquer all mysteries by rule and line” and “unweave a rainbow”.

Richard Dawkins used that phrase as the title of one of his books, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder. He argued that just as some felt that poetry and art exalted them to new levels, so did science for another set of people:
“The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable. It is a deep aesthetic passion to rank with the finest that music and poetry can deliver.”

Richard Feynman made the same point in a BBC interview. He talked about an artist friend of his who said when looking at a beautiful flower “you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing”.    Feynman disagreed:
“I can appreciate the beauty of a flower.

At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. I mean it’s not just beauty at this dimension, at one centimeter; there’s also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, also the processes. The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don’t understand how it subtracts.”

I totally agree with Dawkins and Feynman. Then again, the reason the crowd that believes that unweaving the rainbow ruins everything continues to exist is because, as Dawkins said:
“Nobody boasts of ignorance of literature, but it is socially acceptable to boast ignorance of science and proudly claim incompetence in mathematics.”

Comments

  1. Ramiah KumarNovember 1, 2017 at 11:47 AM

    Very interesting.

    Incidentally, it may not be entirely right to believe that science is cold rationality, full of dry and fairly incomprehensible things. For example, I see beauty in the way the equations show similarity, totally different domains one in which Newtonian gravitational force is defined and other defining the way charges attract or repel each other. Why they have to be defined by nearly the same equations?! It is just beauty.


    Like that, the way of equations both in physics and mathematics are charmers. I am still wonder stuck by the simple, elegant beauty of the infinite fraction defining the golden mean, phi, for example:

    phi = 1 + [ 1 / (1+ 1/(1+ 1/(1+ 1/... ] What an infinite fraction that uses only the number 1 always! :-) Yet, it zeros in on phi which is again a beauty number, but let me not go into the beautiful Fibonacci series that defines it.

    I love science because it has plenty of beauty in it, apart from the logical and explanatory ability. We can keep on singing, "All things bright and beautiful..." even if we wish to replace the word God by Nature in that song and not exclude science in the list! :-)

    ReplyDelete

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