Dear All,
It seems odd to suggest that scientists do not understand beauty.
Beauty and elegance have long been criteria for scientific theory.
Other criteria are also important if our statements about the world
are to be both true and meaningful. Nevertheless, it seems to me
mistaken to say that scientists fail to understand beauty.
I’ll end here, and finish this note by letting a scientist speak
on beauty. Richard Feynman’s comments appear below.
Ken Friedman
“Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars - mere
globs of gas atoms. I, too, can see the stars on a desert night and
feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens
stretches my imagination — stuck on this little carousel, my little
eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern — of which
I am part... What is the pattern. or the meaning, or the why? It does
not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more
marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it.
Why do poets of the present not speak of it? What men arc poets
who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense
spinning sphere of methane must be silent?”
— Richard Feynman
Quoted in: Gleick, James. 1993. Genius: Richard P. Feynman and
Modern Physics. London: Abacus, p. 373.
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