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!