Flipboard Culture Desk on Nostr: How important is beauty to scientists? Most conversations about this revolve around ...

How important is beauty to scientists? Most conversations about this revolve around the things we can see or hear, like photos from the James Webb Space Telescope, or the way physicists perceive some equations as elegant. Sociologists Bridget Ritz and Brandon Vaidyanathan spoke to thousands of scientists about the subject, and discovered they're also motivated by a third kind of beauty: The aesthetic experience of understanding itself. "In our surveys and interviews, when asked where they find beauty in their work, scientists regularly pointed to times when they grasped the hidden order, inner logic or causal mechanisms of natural phenomena," write Ritz and Vaidyanathan for Aeon. "These moments, one UK physicist told us, are ‘like looking into the face of God for non-religious people – how you can look at something and think, oh my God, that’s how things actually work, that’s how things are!’"

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#Beauty #Science #Research #Physics #CellPhotography #Aesthetics #Philosophy