Science and Beauty

Science vs the old world, the world of the unknown. Science, It frees us. Each of us, each individual lives as a result of a series of chain events. We were not destined to live, instead, dispite all odds, we breath, we walk, we love. And everything that is good and beautifull should be understood. Science does not take away the beauty. No! It's only adds. We now know that stars are a spinning ballmade  off methane and helium. Does it takes away it's beauty? It does shine the same way, it makes us dream just the same. But now, we know that it is there, we know what it is, it was not imposed by some bearded man in the sky, it was made by chance. And that, that makes it even more impressive, it makes me dream of all the possibilities, it makes me wonder: how can that be? how does nature work?


"Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars — mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is "mere". 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 carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern — of which I am a part... What is the pattern or the meaning or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little more about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?"


We're no longer constrant by the certanty of living in a limited plane, of dying and going somewhere we're destined to. We have both possibilities and dreams. We can know how the world works, how the animals run, and why. Suddenly, we can see every system unraveling around us. You say something is beautiful, and I agree, but a scientist also aprecciates how marvelous is the life of that being, or the complexity of that system.

"I have a friend who's an artist, and he sometimes takes a view which I don't agree with. He'll hold up a flower and say, "Look how beautiful it is," and I'll agree. But then he'll say, "I, as an artist, can see how beautiful a flower is. But you, as a scientist, take it all apart and it becomes dull." I think he's kind of nutty. [...] There are all kinds of interesting questions that come from a knowledge of science, which only adds to the excitement and mystery and awe of a flower. It only adds. I don't understand how it subtracts."


Note: All the quotes are Richard Feynman's statements