What is Beauty, Anyway?

Richard Feynman will be among the Nobel Prize winners at the World Science Festival this month. In a way.

I'll be doing a reading of QED, the play about Feynman, and as I get ready to step into his life again, I'm hit by a wave of fondness and nostalgia for this person I never met.

I've been reading his words and listening to his voice once more but this time I have an advantage I didn't have when I played him on Broadway a few years ago. Now, with a couple of clicks, I can find him on YouTube. And, one of his clips, I'm surprised to see, brings a catch to my throat.

Feynman is talking about an artist friend who told him that scientists couldn't appreciate the beauty of a flower the way artists could because the scientist takes the flower apart and makes it dull. Feynman is gentle but he thinks this is nutty. "First of all," he says, "the beauty that he sees is available to other people. And to me too, I believe." You have to see the way Feynman says it. His tone is kind, even humble:

But Feynman also talks about how much more the scientist can see than his friend does -- other things that are also beautiful, like the processes deep inside the flower. I can work up a lather myself about this, as I did one night on the Charlie Rose show with Brian Greene and Paul Nurse.

Take a look:

I believe it works both ways. Just as Feynman the scientist could appreciate the beauty of the artist's flower, the rest of us can also revel in the view science gives us of the inside of the flower.

I didn't always understand this. When I was in high school, I fell under the spell of that crazy idea that if you're interested in the arts you can't be interested in science. I heard the romantic poets' siren songs and didn't know that the beauty they saw in a host of golden daffodils was confined to those flowers' thin exteriors. They never dreamed of the infinity of universes beneath the petals.

That's why I've been devoting myself to the World Science Festival. During each day, scientists will talk in plain language to New Yorkers in 20 venues all over the city, and in the evening musicians, dancers and actors will stage performances that are based on science and after which artists, scientists and audiences will join in stimulating discussions. In halls and theaters and even in parks and street fairs, New York will have a chance to watch beauty bloom.

What is beauty, anyway? It's more than something pleasant looking. If it doesn't stop us in our tracks and make us unable to move for a moment, unable to put into words what's closing off the breath in our throats, then maybe it's pretty, but it probably isn't beauty.

Science, though, is beauty.

And I think the World Science Festival will take our breath away.

Comments

[bluesnot]

Science adds to the vocabulary of beauty. It aids articulation about and observation of the natural world.

[zann]

As a student of biochemistry, I was in it for the beauty. Imagining the spinning and vibrations and strange quirks of subatomic particles, and that it was real, and all throughout space, and serenely existing both within our understanding and beyond where the human mind can go.

[ReelBusy]

A better headline for this story would be Science is Beauty.

Well said Mr. Alda.

[111]

I once fell in love with a man who was short, fat, balding, wore glasses and had a huge, hooked nose. I found myself thinking about how beautiful I found him. In my eyes that nose was magnificent, had character, etc. In my eyes there was no one else so perfect.

What you love is beautiful. What evokes feelings of connectedness is beautiful.

For example - I think this is a beautiful photograph http://redstarcafe.files.wordpress.com/2007/06/minamata.jpg

[CarbondaleKid]

I agree. W. Eugene Smith is one of the great photographers. Your photo is from a series called "Minimata" (sp?) a place in Japan where the citizens were being poisoned by the local chemical company, Chisso. Their goons roughed-up Smith and shortened his life. Here is a link to his bio and work:
http://www.photo-seminars.com/Fame/eugesmith.htm

[NABNYC]

Here's my vote: Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah, performed by Allison Crowe at You Tube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIMOdVXAPJ0

Strangely enough I would add to that almost anything by George Gershwin, Mozart's Jupiter symphony and Requim, and the famous quarter from Rigoletto. Also any baby -- stand in line with tired annoyed people, once a baby shows up everyone is smiling. What is that if not beauty? Squirrels which are kind of tree rats but I feed them because they're beautiful to me. Almost all the birds. Every cat without exception.

Victor Jara and everything he wrote and performed. Every painting or mural by Diego Rivera, the poems of Pablo Neruda. Manon of the Spring, Indochine. A great summer thunderstorm. Easter Sunday mass at St. Patricks Cathedral. Grand Central Terminal. Roger's Chocolates from B.C.

[Stirner]

As a Hegelian, I'm of the opinion that anything "beautiful" would have to overcome the either/or thinking of modern science. Strict categorization and definition is an exclusion of the ambiguous, the spiritual, the "other". Cartesian clarity and distinctness pays the price of not being able to comprehend the ambiguity inherent in the beautiful -- which is a form of the "spiritual" (a fusion of object and subject). In contemporary thought this opposition between the clarity of science and the ambiguity of fine art is found in the distinction between "right" and "left" brain dominance. The "left" being more logical -- with the logic here NOT being a dialectical logic, a login in which opposites are reconciled but rather one driven to fixed conclusions. To assert that beauty cannot be defined is not a failure of thought or the object, but rather an indication that the event is spiritual in nature, and hence unable to be confined within the defining and excluding understanding of modern science. The presence of the "ugly" (and yes, there are ugly things) is not the direct result of pragmatism, but rather the expression of minds focused upon a logic of clarity, exclusion, and definition... the mathematical and pragmatic mind (very evident in our own technological culture) will of necessity generate objects which might be of interest, but not beautiful -- and hardly sublime. Ah, by the way, Mr. Alda -- my Mother knew your father when he was a small boy living in Old Forge, PA.

[Zankee]

HuffPost's Pick

If Universal "Beauty"(i­nspiration­), is only a measure, achieved through outside visual perception for diagnosis by the mind, then, as it does not include the blind, it cannot be accepted as Universal "Beauty".... One need not eyes to appreciate(SEE) Universal "Beauty" of this eternally evolving existance....

If you do not "SEE".., close your eyes....

[TomR]

----
What is beauty, anyway?
----

That which creates a feeling of appreciation and/or appeals to you on an emotional level.

- Tom

[Zankee]

An emotional stimulus resulting from comparative analysis of at least two different points of reference of experience or non-experience....

[falgiano]

there really is no conflict between the arts and sciences. i love the idea of artists and scientists in the same forum speaking from their distinct perspectives on what makes so much of the world and universe beautiful and mysterious. one can only enhance the other.

[itolduso]

Two sides of the same coin-science & art. Universal truth.....the search of, the expression of...what is.

[lisakaz2]

Interesting post. I have nothing to add except how much I'm enjoying TV Land's 4 star M*A*S*H marathon. Still stands up and it's a pity its lessons were forgotten by too many. Hope this reminds some.

[Nezua]

I appreciate this post and the thesis. But must take issue, as an artist, with this:

"I heard the romantic poets' siren songs and didn't know that the beauty they saw in a host of golden daffodils was confined to those flowers' thin exteriors"

No. Not the exterior. The beauty a poet or artist takes from a host of daffodils weaves through the very soul of the flower, the heart of the artist, melds into the sun, blows apart and becomes the wind, and is always a shapeless understanding which is why the artist or poet can then translate that beauty into a puddle of butter, an oranging sky, a spark in the dark, a woman's opening eye.

It is a beauty within that the flowers help the poet to see in the outside world.

[rucognizant]

Well spoken Nezua!
I would add that it was as an artist, that I approached the science as well. To fully know, explore & understand, what I was painting!

[sassafra]

years ago when i was a young woman i was majoring in physics and chemistry in college when i ran across a set of the "feynman lectures of physics" and i bought the set on a whim to suppliment my course texts. little did i know then the enormous impact that those books would have on my life, for within their pages lay an expression of beauty and elegance for the universe rarely seen in the usual sterile science tomes.
i was inspired by those books to eventually join a nasa project, the hubble space telescope. now when i see pictures from that instrument i can reflect on the beauty mr. feynman spoke to me of in those books and know what a talented man he was and how lucky i was that i listened.

[ArtLiquidBlogspot]

Touch.....­.......Wor­king in a library,a 3 to 4 year old child is running,pointing her finger in the air!
I'm sitting behind a desk, I say nothing,I point my finger,she approaches,we touch fingers,without word being spoken....­.....Beaut­y.........­........Gr­eat piece Mr.Alda

[Compas]

Science allows us to see so much more than just meets the eye. It's all about the real connections. Kudos to Alan Alda and the World Science Festival!