Beauty in Knowledge
Two nights ago, I was relaxing at the Bar Marsella in Barcelona with my roommate after spending our January teaching in Europe. We chose this bar because it was once the favorites of Picasso and Hemingway. Over the hours we sat, my friend mentioned how he viewed music after a near prodigal upbringing around music and now studying music and computer science at MIT. He described how knowing theory deeply can change how he listens to music now. It is not a passive process but is full of analysis and understanding.
At each note or melody, he can understand a choice made by another artist. From how he described it, this bombardment of information is not always an improvement over simply enjoying music in all its imperfections and flaws.
Soon after, he asked if I saw the natural world the same after studying physics for years. This is what I hope to explore in this brief post.
Does understanding the natural world take away from its beauty?
Before humans had the tools of mathematics and science to understand the world we live in, we told stories of gods and giants. We wrote myths of creation to explain our origins. Now with the explanatory power of science, we no longer require many of these myths.
The Greeks once told stories of Helios and his chariot pulling the sun across our sky each day. When looking at the sun now, we know it is a massive sphere of gas millions of miles away glowing due to a billion-year-long nuclear reaction called fusion. To me, understanding the science behind our universe is more beautiful than any myth or religious tale.
I see beauty in emergence. We can understand massive and complex phenomena in the universe from the application of fundamental laws. While we lost the ability of gods and goddesses, we found a fundamental language to describe the world we see. Science is the language of the universe, written in mathematics, and through it, we can examine our natural world at a depth and accuracy never seen before in human history.
As I described to my friend that night at the bar, as I look out at the world and understand its inner working, I feel deeply empowered. I often describe this feeling as humanistic. Newton famously said:
“If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”
The ability I now have to understand the natural world was achieved through the work of countless scientists across centuries. However, it is deeper than science. We as humans have developed the ability to understand the universe. I feel incredibly proud and awe-inspired by the nearly constant effort by humanity to explain our experience.
As I rode through the Pyrenees mountains from Andorra to Barcelona, I looked out and saw mountains and vast landscapes of lush vegetation. What I saw, didn’t stop there.
Passing mountains, you can see streaks of different sediments. I can see lines of mountains created from the movement of tectonic plates over billions of years. The same mountains humans have lived on and traveled through for thousands of years, but solely due to science, I can see more than nearly all of the humans who have been here before me.
I see beauty in knowledge. Understanding the natural world has never ceased to amaze and I feel incredibly lucky to be able to take part in progressing human knowledge, even to a minimal degree if that.
If you enjoy this concept, I recommend reading this speech by Andrew Abbott at the University of Chicago. It is wonderful.
