Western Science, Non-Western Resentment.

A heated exchange about culture and civilization does not make for good dinner table conversation. This obvious proposition is something I often flaunt, always to dismal results.  On this particular occasion, I was trying to demonstrate the superiority of modern Western medicine over alternative medicinal practices and my parents were more willing to listen when I substituted ‘Western Medicine’ with ‘modern medical diagnosis’ .
On a different occasion, the eminent scientist Roddam Narasimha was speaking at IISc and repeatedly used the phrase ‘Western science’ and bemoaned the lack of knowledge today’s Indian youth possess about ‘Indian science.’
 Recently, a group of students at an African University claimed that they will no longer study the science of White Colonial Oppressors and wanted to re-do science from an "African perspective."

The first thing that comes to mind is – post-colonialism. Which civilization would not like to claim Darwin and Newton as products of their culture? However, clearly, these men were product of the European tradition and it is natural for us to wish otherwise. After all, to think that your civilization did not contribute as much to the modern world inspires neither patriotism nor self-worth.

This sense of inadequacy can manifest in two ways. The first is by denying the validity of science because of its origins, or to claim credible alternatives to it, as exemplified by the events at my dinner table . Of course, this is a pernicious view and to uphold it in the 21st century  is to betray a lack of scientific training or solipsism that is antithetical to the scientific mindset. If alternate systems of medicine work, they can be studied and subsumed under the scientific paradigm. (example :Ayurgenomics (?) )  The cultures where they evolved cannot claim complete credit, (for being enlightened when the Europeans were ‘primitive savages’) simply because, the method of arriving at a certain panacea is not consistent with today’s scientific standards. (Obviously, considering the temporal separation between modern science and traditional medicinal texts).
This is a slippery slope too, because, a tendency to distrust ‘Western science’ is prevalent but am unwillingness to question and to  exercise conformational bias when the source is ‘Indian science’
The second view, is to claim Indians had a very significant role to play in the development of modern science. Sure, Indian contributions go unacknowledged or underemphasized. But to claim to have an equal share in the development of modern science as the Europeans did is factually untrue and betrays a sense of parochialism and a tendency to overlook the truth.
How then to resolve this paradox? To retain a sense of pride in our culture and simultaneously respect the scientific spirit? If the origin of this pride is in terms of significance of contributions to modern knowledge, the scales are disproportionately tilted in favour of ‘Western culture.’
As much as it pains me to say it, Lord Macaulay was not entirely unjustified  when he sanctimoniously wrote in 1835 “A single shelf of a good European library is worth the entire native literature of India and Arabia." (This might have been the case only for scientific or political literature during Macaulay's time, not for literature in general.)
The answer, I fear, is not entirely straightforward. The problem lies in the terms ‘Western science’ and ‘Indian science.’
When one says ‘Western science’, one generally supposes it means “science that originated entirely in the West.”  Similarly with the words “Indian science” or “Islamic science” and so on.
Furthermore, an implicit and well concealed notion is at work here and is crucial. The measure of a civilization is equated with its scientific achievements, that it is a matter of pride to have science originate in your society and it says a lot about your culture and history. (Nothing wrong here per se. At the very least, it serves as a motivation for the next generation to do better science) As a people then,  cultures in which science (or modernity) originated seem to be superior to cultures (or people) which didn’t produce a Newton or a Darwin. Thirdly, the role of a teacher is naturally thrust on a ‘scientific’ society to enlighten the rest of the world. This can be painful, as magnanimously acknowledging the primacy of another person isn’t a virtue our brains come pre-programmed with. Note, that not all these notions are entirely outlandish. The worst excesses of Imperialism were often justified as a project to bring enlightenment and education to the benighted peoples of the Orient.
However, the first and second notions are quite untrue. In that, they ignore two very important facts. The first is the diffusion hypothesis of history and the second is the strange and complicated ways in which knowledge evolves.

Virtually, no great culture we know of today has evolved in isolation. Globalization is a very old phenomenon. The Indians and Greeks occupying important positions in Iranian courts, Greek campaigns in India, the Silk route and the Indian ocean trade were all global. Ideas have been exchanged between civilizations for a long time. Fascinating studies on how Greek systems of philosophy influenced the Indians and vice-versa, on how the European enlightenment might have been impossible or severely retarded if not for the Islamic Caliphates of the Middle East are quite well received in scholarly circles.
Thus, it stands to reason that “Western science” cannot have evolved in isolation. A fascinating recent study on how modern calculus might have its origins in the Kerala school of mathematics (transmitted to Europe by Jesuit missionaries from India) has garnered a lot of attention.

There is a larger point here.  Science is the most powerful method humanity has devised. As Homo Sapiens with lowly biological origins, a tremendous amount of effort is required to climb down tress, crawl out of caves and build a sustainable global civilization.The enormity of this task must melt down any civilizational borders imposed on us. The scientific enterprise is by far larger than any civilizational boundaries. Its genesis lies not merely in the hands of a few dead white old men from a superior civilization, but also in the work of many unacknowledged and unknown peoples of the past. Modern science is also a collective, cooperative effort. Massive international collaborations produce wonders like CERN which were inconceivable a few centuries ago. National boundaries are becoming increasingly insignificant in science. By construction, the scientific enterprise does not entertain narrow parochialism.
To quote Carl Sagan :“Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”  (The dot referred to is the famous pale blue dot, Earth as seen from billions of miles away)

Sure, modern science does have most of its roots in Europe, but re-inventing the wheel did not prove necessary. Centuries of work by the Greeks, Indians, Chinese and the Arabs was the proverbial giants’ shoulder on which the edifice of modern science was erected. Europe was uniquely poised at that point in history to carry on the work of civilization, to find satisfactory answers to questions we humans are impelled to ponder upon, and to progress to dramatically unanticipated heights which has completely revolutionized the world and kickoff what the Physicist David Deutsch called "The Beginning of Infinity".  To put it in Kuhnian terms, establishment of the scientific paradigm necessitated many false starts, many dead ends to explore the philosophy and the method of inquiry to establish a common consensus that we celebrate today as the scientific method.
To me, this grand historical narrative of millennia of international cooperation and cross-cultural exchange of ideas to confront questions and problems humans collectively face is far more awe-inspiring than the tiny surge of patriotic excitement when I learn that a certain theorem discovered in India predates Europe by a few centuries. It is also more consistent with how we understand the evolution of a system of knowledge today.
Thus, it is time we do away with antiquated ideas of Western science, Indian science and the associated resentment and pride. Clearly, basing a culture’s worth merely on its scientific achievements also seems ludicrous.
This “scientific internationalism” is also more in spirit of science. After all, the speed of light in vacuum has the same value whether one measures it in India, UK, or the Andromeda galaxy!

Perceptions of Lord Macaulay in modern India

On the unfair criticism of Lord Macaulay in present day India.

It has become accepted wisdom to blame Lord Macaulay for all that ails the present Indian education system .The ubiquitousness of this rather simplistic opinion struck me, as it were, when the principal of a reputed engineering college in Bangalore started his address to the students by squarely laying the blame on Lord Macaulay for the mediocre nature of the current Indian educational scenario. This is clearly absurd, not merely because of the time-frames involved in the proposition, but also due to the construction of a convenient evil boogeyman who can take responsibility, thus saving those in-charge the torturous exercise of honest self-critique and the need to make exigent changes to the Indian education system.

Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay, (1800-1859) is widely regarded as the greatest English historian of the Victorian era. He was a proud Englishman and like most learned men of his day, expresses a blatant Eurocentric world-view in his writings. It was accepted wisdom in the Imperialistic age that the “Orientals” needed European education for their upliftment, and the very project of colonization was rationalized as an exercise in bringing enlightenment values to the benighted heathen of the Orient. It must be noted that western notions of inherent superiority extends as far back as the Greeks and Romans, whose world was dichotomized into Greeks and Barbarians, and conquest implied Hellenizing the Barbarians and instilling Greek values in such societies.

Thus, it is easy to contextualize Lord Macaulay’s views in his famous “Minute on Education” when he opines :
“ I am quite ready to take the oriental learning at the valuation of the orientalists themselves. I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia. The intrinsic superiority of the Western literature is indeed fully admitted by those members of the committee who support the oriental plan of education.

It was the “Minute on Education” speech that settled the education debate in the British Parliament and paved way for the introduction of English education in India.

It must be said that this article is not meant as a passionate defense of Macaulay. Rather, it’s an attempt to honestly evaluate Macaulay’s position and discuss his views in a rational manner. This discussion has become a rarity in the recent past due to post-colonial and ultra-nationalistic views as a reactionary defence to colonial racism and condescension. However, this discussion is of quite some importance, as it seeks to analyze the very roots of institutionalized education in the Indian subcontinent.

Lord Macaulay makes a compelling case for introducing English education in India in his famous “Minute by the Hon’ble” dated 2/2/1835. ( http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00generallinks/macaulay/txt_minute_education_1835.html ) 
There are two crucial points raised by Macaulay in this letter:
1)  To educate the Natives (Indians) in the European sciences.
2) To use English as the medium of instruction.

I’m certain that no one shall argue with the less controversial former proposition.
To quote Macaulay -  It is argued, or rather taken for granted, that by literature the Parliament can have meant only Arabic and Sanscrit literature; that they never would have given the honourable appellation of "a learned native" to a native who was familiar with the poetry of Milton, the metaphysics of Locke, and the physics of Newton; but that they meant to designate by that name only such persons as might have studied in the sacred books of the Hindoos all the uses of cusa-grass, and all the mysteries of absorption into the Deity.

One can see the false alternative employed here. It is dishonest to contrast secular knowledge and religious tradition of two countries. It would be not be entirely wrong to contrast Milton, Locke and Newton with Indian giants of the same genre – Kalidasa, Chankya(/Navya-Nyaya philosophers) , Aryabhatta/Bhaskara/ Nilakantha etc. Even this comparison is misleading as the aforementioned English and Indian philosophers are separated by centuries.

One can see the Hegelian view of history shining through Macaulay’s thesis. He believes history to be a continuous series of leaps of progress based on a teleological design. Thus, it can be argued that his view of inferior/superior civilization is not based on a racial bias as many Indians believe, but on the civilization being scientifically competent. This can be inferred from the following argument put forth by him :

“Within the last hundred and twenty years, a nation which had previously been in a state as barbarous as that in which our ancestors were before the Crusades has gradually emerged from the ignorance in which it was sunk, and has taken its place among civilized communities. I speak of Russia. There is now in that country a large educated class abounding with persons fit to serve the State in the highest functions, and in nowise inferior to the most accomplished men who adorn the best circles of Paris and London. There is reason to hope that this vast empire which, in the time of our grandfathers, was probably behind the Punjab, may in the time of our grandchildren, be pressing close on France and Britain in the career of improvement. And how was this change effected? Not by flattering national prejudices; not by feeding the mind of the young Muscovite with the old women's stories which his rude fathers had believed; not by filling his head with lying legends about St. Nicholas; not by encouraging him to study the great question, whether the world was or not created on the 13th of September; not by calling him "a learned native" when he had mastered all these points of knowledge; but by teaching him those foreign languages in which the greatest mass of information had been laid up, and thus putting all that information within his reach. “

However, it must be noted that he completely ignores the large body of scientific work undertaken by the Babylonians, Egyptians, Indians, Greeks, Chinese and the Islamic civilizations prior to 17^th century Europe. Also, the diffusion of knowledge across civilizations was possibly unknown to, or ignored by,  Macaulay. The existence of diffusion channels, by means of which cultural, philosophical and scientific exchanges took place (along with trade), is so interesting that it merits a separate discussion. It is possible to show that the entire scheme of the European enlightenment would have been impossible, if not severely delayed or impaired, if inputs from the hallmarks of other civilizations had not reached European shores.  Neglecting these diffusion channels and labeling the entire scientific enterprise to have originated by purely European efforts is dishonest and an anti-thesis to one of Macaulay’s heroes, Isaac Newton, who famously remarked “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” 
However, in Macaulay’s time, the diffusion view of history was not mainstream and was mentioned only in passing by reputed scholars. Thus, one cannot entirely fault Macaulay’s position, brimming with chauvinistic patriotism and an inherited pride about his native English culture.

The second proposition has been more problematic. If one wants to educate the populace, why enforce a foreign language?

This has no easy answer, and it is here that Macaulay’s line of argumentation is rich with logical fallacies. He wrongly equates the geographical region where the scientific revolution took place with the language that happens to be spoken by its natives, and believes that the language somehow inspired an effusion of knowledge. This can be inferred from :
“The languages of western Europe civilised Russia. I cannot doubt that they will do for the Hindoo what they have done for the Tartar.”
“ It may safely be said that the literature now extant in that language(English) is of greater value than all the literature which three hundred years ago was extant in all the languages of the world together”

It is obvious to any reader that it is a mere historical coincidence that the European languages(especially English) have become the carriers of scientific and political knowledge. If the scientific revolution took place in China instead, I’d possibly be typing this article in a keyboard with a thousand keys!
It is unlikely that the European languages are necessarily more amenable to scientific enquiry as opposed to any other Oriental tongue, although the linguists can ascertain the truth of this.

The second reason for the introduction of English is more practical. By 1835, Europe had a clear monopoly on scientific and political discourse. For the institutionalized teaching of the sciences in the Indian subcontinent, one must translate the works of European scholarship into Indian languages. This is a problematic idea, for two reasons :
1) The translation must take place from English into Sanskrit and Arabic, as they were the languages extant in India during the 19^th century. However, access to Sanskrit was not universal and restricted to certain castes. Thus, introduction of a universal educational scheme is rendered difficult. Instruction in Sanskrit and Arabic would mean a further, yet subtle reinforcement of the divisive acrimony between the Hindu-Muslim communities. It would not serve scholarly purposes ie. of discussion, exchange of ideas etc.,  to have two sets of intellectuals speaking two separate tongues. Thus, the introduction of a third, neutral tongue seems logical as it would ensure a universal medium of instruction and would homogenize differences of religion, caste etc.
2) To implement the aforementioned translation scheme, one would first require a body of scholars fluent in English and the Indic languages. These scholars can then translate the works of European scholars. However, it seems an unnecessary course of action and one might as well skip this step and introduce English along with scientific education.  In fact, this is exactly what Macaulay sought to do. To quote Macaulay :
We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern,  --a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.

If the reader is magnanimous enough to overlook the disingenuousness of the first statement, we realize that Macaulay’s introduction of English might have been a temporary way of ensuring immediate scientific instruction in the subcontinent. It seems clear that his emphasis was not on the introduction of English, but science, and he vaguely references to the aforementioned translation scheme described in the second sentence of the above quote.

How Ironic then, that the so-called  “Macaulay’s Children” of modern India are engaged in a life-style not advocated by Macaulay! Instead of enriching our vernaculars with European input and using them to teach science and reason, we seem to be busy forgetting our native dialects and adopt speaking accented English in a misguided attempt to seem  ‘modern, civilized or cool’ .  This culture of  snobbery toward everything Indian, which many characterize as Macaulayism cannot be attributed to Macaulay.

By no stretch of imagination did Macaulay respect the Indian tradition. However, this is due to his dichotomized worldview , of civilizations evolving sufficiently to adopt science and civilizations languishing under superstition and barbarism. He saw India as fitting into the latter category, and this was due to 1) Lack of objectivity on his part. 2) Chauvinistic patriotism 3) Lack of knowledge about the Indian scientific tradition, of mighty scholars such as Aryabhatta, Bhaskara, Sushrutha, Varahamihira, Kalidasa, Banabhatta, and the giants of the Kerala school of mathematics.
However, it is an indisputable view,  that in the 19^th century, the European hegemony over scientific, philosophical and political thought was absolute. Whatever our illustrious past might have been, it did not measure up to European science in the 19^th century and it would behoove us to admit it. Thus, it is a matter of pride that our ancestors readily adopted educating themselves in the forefront of knowledge at the time. This  engineered collision of knowledge, between the east and west, produced an effervescence of talents rarely seen before ; stalwarts such as JC Bose, SN Bose, Mahalnobis, CV Raman, S Chandrasekhar, Tagore, Sardar Patel, Nehru, Mahatma Gandhi who would ultimately be responsible for the liberation and re-construction of our glorious country.

The supercilious Lord Macaulay might have been blatantly wrong on many counts; but the introduction of institutionalized education in the subcontinent has rightly earned him the appellation “that other great emancipator of Victorian England”  (By Christopher Hitchens) . It must be noted that he did not support the conversion of natives to Christianity(We abstain, and I trust shall always abstain, from giving any public encouragement to those who are engaged in the work of converting the natives to Christianity)., believed in the separation of church and state, and adhered to enlightenment values such as reason, free inquiry etc. which have become the bedrock of the modern world.

Thus, it must be noted that while there is no dearth of colonial tyrants, it is utterly ridiculous to put Macaulay on the same pedestal as Robert Clive, General Dyer, Lord Curzon and Winston Churchill.
While it can be argued that the introduction of English served a practical colonial purpose, viz. to have a class of Indians to govern by British law, it ended up being used by the Indians to liberate themselves and aggrandize their standing.

To quote Hitchens “ The revenge for Amritsar is this: the Indians have annexed the most precious and subtle possession of their former conquerors—their language. Thus one of the things about India that is most different is one of those things that is—ostensibly at least—most the same. Indians have mastered the “tone of voice” that, not so long ago, mastered them”

  So the next time you hear someone unfairly criticizing Macaulay or deliberately misquoting him ("“I have travelled across the length and breadth of India and I have not seen one person who is a beggar, who is a thief. Such wealth I have seen in this country, such high moral values, people of such calibre, that I do not think we would ever conquer this country, unless we break the very backbone of this nation, which is her spiritual and cultural heritage, and, therefore, I propose that we replace her old and ancient education system, her culture, for if the Indians think that all that is foreign and English is good and greater than their own, they will lose their self-esteem, their native self-culture and they will become what we want them, a truly dominated nation")  take it with a grain of salt, and demonstrate the falsity of their position!

An 'ode' to the starry skies

An ‘ode’ to the starry skies :

From times immemorial, humans have been fascinated by the beautiful. The ancient man looked at the beautiful sunrise, the inspiring star-studded skies, and sparkling oceans and attributed these to a benevolent, all-knowing god. He thought these were his creations, or god’s gift to humanity. This is a common theme among cultures. This anthropocentric interpretation of events in nature, attributing the beautiful to the goodness of a god (and hence developing elaborate rituals to please him) itself is indicative of the central importance of beauty in human development.

Philosophers, throughout history have attempted to explain the nature of the beautiful, or simply put : what is beauty? Why do we only characterize certain objects as beautiful?
An in-depth philosophical analysis of beauty is a vast topic. Beauty in a deeper sense is a perception of harmony and symmetry in nature.  The great Socrates declares – Symmetry and limitation are the greatest forms of the beautiful. 

In his immortal poem “Ode on a Greecian Urn” , John Keats states “Beauty is truth, truth beauty ,—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. 

Beautiful sights are often a profound source of inspiration and vice-versa.  A flower has often been a source of inspiration for poets to write beautiful poems. The famous Dante Aligheri states : Beauty awakens the soul to act.

Also beautiful scenes inspire a great amount of joy in us. As Keats remarks : A thing of beauty is a joy forever.

Today evolutionary biologists claim that perceptions of beauty are determined evolutionarily. Certain  aspects of people and landscapes considered beautiful are typically found in situations likely to give enhanced survival of the perceiving human's genes.
Thus, beauty is something synonymous to joy, inspiration, symmetry, harmony etc.  Beauty inspires us, mystifies us, gives us great joy and thus central in our lives. Without the beautiful, life wouldn’t be worth living.

             

When a poet or an artist looks at a bird’s flight or the rising sun or the starry skies, he is wonder-struck and goes on to describe it. He anthropomorphizes, glorifies and celebrates the beauty of nature in his poems or paintings. However when a scientist looks at these things, he asks questions.  To quote the famous novelist Rudyard Kipling :
I keep six honest-serving men

They taught me all I knew.
Their names are what and why and when

And how and where and who.

Now this may seem strange. Why ask these questions? Why bother to know why stars shine, or how the flower evolved, or the aerodynamics of bird-flight or insect-flight? They are inherently beautiful! Why complicate things by asking these questions? Or worse, why reduce these beautiful gifts to nature to ‘scary equations’ or messy formulae? Simply put, there is no reason to do so. We can just savor the beauty of nature and move on. 

However, bear with me for a moment. Let me state ‘rigorously’  that  : If we assume that the experience of beauty leads to happiness, and futher assume that maximizing happiness is a worthy goal, then the scientific method of analysis helps you accomplishes the goal. A stronger form of the above claim would be : The scientific method is necessary and quite sufficient for anyone to ascend the highest echelons of beauty and soar into bliss, a dimension of bliss otherwise inaccessible. Or as Feynman put it “ 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”.

Now allow me to substantiate my seemingly audacious claim.  It is true that science seeks to break down objects to their simplest component and study them. Objectivism and reductionism are integral components of the scientific method. However, as it turns out this is exactly what Is needed to perceive ‘higher’ dimensions of beauty.    When Galileo turned his telescope, when Isaac Newton unraveled the mysteries of the nature by employing rigorous, logical methods, little did they know that they have not just set out to describe how nature works, but have created a source of beauty that would startle and inspire people for centuries. 

Now science is not just a subject we study at school, skate through in college and erase from our ‘physiological hard-disk’.  It is a way of looking at nature, and I shall not be mistaken in saying the ONLY way of successfully describing Mother Nature and her seemingly mysterious ways.

Science is a powerful tool for knowing what is true, what is not, how to know if something is true and why something is true. Thus it is fundamental to know science in order to truly understand nature. To quote Feynman  : “Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty -- some most unsure, some nearly sure, none absolutely certain”.  These statements or laws of nature are obtained rigorously after many years or in some cases, decades or even centuries of pain-staking research and hard-work. The scientific method involves: Observations, Hypothesis, theory and experiment.  This said, I will go on to describe the beauty of scientific analysis.   

Henri Poincare (whose famous Poincare conjecture was solved recently by Gregory Perelman) states : “The scientist does not study nature because it is useful to do so. He studies it because he takes pleasure in it, and he takes pleasure in it because it is beautiful. If nature were not beautiful it would not be worth knowing, and life would not be worth living. I am not speaking, of course, of the beauty which strikes the senses, of the beauty of qualities and appearances. I am far from despising this, but it has nothing to do with science. What I mean is that more intimate beauty which comes from the harmonious order of its parts, and which a pure intelligence can grasp. “

What does he mean by saying “….that more intimate beauty which comes from the harmonious order of its parts, and which a pure intelligence can grasp”?
Answering this question will complete my ‘proof’ (:P) 

To do this I again quote Feynman( Feynman is such a brilliant physicist and one of the best science communicators of all time that I can’t resist quoting him!)
This is from his famous “The Feynman lectures on Physics” : 

"One of the most impressive discoveries was the origin of the energy of the stars, that makes them continue to burn. One of the men who discovered this was out with his girl friend the night after he realized that nuclear reactions must be going on in the stars in order to make them shine. 
She said "Look at how pretty the stars shine!" 
He said, "Yes, and right now I am the only man in the world who knows why they shine." 
She merely laughed at him. She was not impressed with being out with the only man who, at that moment, knew why stars shine. Well, it is sad to be alone, but that is the way it is in this world."

Suppose a scientist is on such a date and he look at stars. Of course he can see their aesthetic beauty! This is something everyone can see. However, he sees much more. He exactly knows why they twinkle and why the planets and the moon do not. He doesn’t merely see the twinkling but perceives the scintillation as a combined effect of the varying refractive index of the atmosphere and the distance of the stars. Everybody see a star shine. He perceives the nuclear fusion reactions occurring inside them, the proton-proton cycle, the CNO cycle etc.  However there is MUCH more to stars than twinkling and shining(which is as far as a common man can see). A scientist asks “how were they formed?” and can see stellar evolution. He is quickly reminded of the beautiful images of various Nebula .He can also see what the star would eventually become.  He then asks what makes these nuclear reactions occur and thinks about Nuclear reactions, the strong and weak forces, elementary particle physics and the standard model. When he looks at a star he knows he is essentially staring into a time-machine. Light from the stars take a LOT of time to reach us  since they are so far away, so we are seeing the light that left the star so many light years back. This leads him to wonder about the constancy of the speed of light, the universal speed limit and into the fascinating domain of special relativity.
One can go further. What do the stars matter to us? Well, good question. We wouldn’t be here if not for those ‘tiny’ wonders!
The material ejected out from hot stars contained elements like carbon, nitrogen,oxygen, silicon essential to synthesize life. The earth got its initial share of elements from its parent star – our sun. How incredible then, that from these elements, intelligent life evolved on our planet by an ongoing process of evolution by natural selection! This leads him to think about biology and genetics. Gentics leads him to the unifying material of all life on the planet : DNA. Their structure leads him to chemistry which takes him back to physics!
This (glorious ‘day-dreaming’) takes him to mathematics, the language of physics and the ‘code’ in which our universe is written. As someone remarked “God must be a mathematician". It is believed that most mathematical theorems can be derived from the axioms of set theory using first or second order logic. This leads us to axiomatic systems and their inherent limitations described by Godel’s two theorems (And the fact that David Hilbert’s program to find a consistent and complete set of axioms for all of mathematics is impossible).
Thus, what began as ‘looking’ at stars in the night-sky led him to the most fundamental and inherent properties of mathematical statements, traversing through the body of scientific knowledge and experiencing a sense of beauty unmatched, unparalleled by any other.

This is the sense of beauty science creates.  So now, do you believe me when I say science adds to the beauty of nature? (My proof better be complete!)
This God is a mathematician argument is humorously  depiceted in this cartoon. Please go take a look before reading any further! http://abstrusegoose.com/549 )

To conclude : Science profoundly adds to the beauty of nature.  As Marcel Proust remarked “The process of discovery consists not in seeing new sights, but in seeing with new eyes”. It is exactly this ‘new eyes’ science provides, with which we can see dimensions of beauty inaccessible otherwise.  To quote Edmund Burke : What grander idea can the mind of man form to itself than a prodigious, glorious and fiery globe hanging in the midst of an infinite and boundless space surrounded with bodies of whom our earth is scarcely any thing in comparison, moving their rounds about its body and held tight to their respective orbits by the attractive force inherent to it while they are suspended in the same space by the Creator's almighty arm! And then let us cast our eyes up to the spangled canopy of heaven, where innumerable luminaries at such an immense distance from us cover the face of the skies. All suns as great as that which illumines us, surrounded with earths perhaps no way inferior to the ball which we inhabit and no part of the amazing whole unfilled! System running into system, and worlds bordering on worlds! Sun, earth, moon, stars be ye made, and they were made!"

        
So the next time you doubt the beauty of science sit in a rotating chair, spin yourself and push your hands inside toward you and prepare to be amazed and mystified when the law of conservation of angular momentum makes you go faster!