by heehaw » Wed Jan 13, 2016 10:35 am
The ancient Greeks, our intellectual "founding fathers," or perhaps I'd better say (these days) "our founding parents," created mathematics as we know it, and created astronomy as we know it, and made halting steps towards physics as we know it; but, they also were deeply interested in beauty. We moderns have not made any breakthrough on beauty. We humans find flowers beautiful. That, to me, is a remarkable fact. Because the flowers have no stake in us considering them to be beautiful, or at least only a minor stake, compared to the vital stake they have in having the bees consider them to be attractive (beautiful?). We and the bees (and the butterflies) have a common standard of beauty, though bees and butterflies have, as far as I know, no mathematics or astronomy or physics. So, what is beauty? How vital is it to the Universe? The reason I launched on this discourse is, of course, the extraordinary beauty of the Astronomy Picture of the Day: today, and indeed almost every day. Have you ever seen an ugly astronomical photograph? Yet before telescopes (and long-exposure photography) we humans had never glimpsed these sights: but we find them beautiful! How can that be?
The ancient Greeks, our intellectual "founding fathers," or perhaps I'd better say (these days) "our founding parents," created mathematics as we know it, and created astronomy as we know it, and made halting steps towards physics as we know it; but, they also were deeply interested in beauty. We moderns have not made any breakthrough on beauty. We humans find flowers beautiful. That, to me, is a remarkable fact. Because the flowers have no stake in us considering them to be beautiful, or at least only a minor stake, compared to the vital stake they have in having the bees consider them to be attractive (beautiful?). We and the bees (and the butterflies) have a common standard of beauty, though bees and butterflies have, as far as I know, no mathematics or astronomy or physics. So, what is beauty? How vital is it to the Universe? The reason I launched on this discourse is, of course, the extraordinary beauty of the Astronomy Picture of the Day: today, and indeed almost every day. Have you ever seen an ugly astronomical photograph? Yet before telescopes (and long-exposure photography) we humans had never glimpsed these sights: but we find them beautiful! How can that be?