I was listening to a song the other day (thank you Spotify Discover Weekly) called 'Red' by Phoria. It's a nice piece, floating ambient piano coupled to a clapped beat and slightly breathy singer, it's a good song to listen to when you're thinking about other things. Halfway through the song though, blooming from the gentle wailing vocals comes a deep, soothing voice.
"..The beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me, too.."
"..I believe.."
"He'll hold up a flower and say, "look how beautiful it is".."
"..take this all apart and it becomes dull.."
"..the inner structure...also the processes.."
Now I have quite a thing for lyrics and the little corner of my brain that had been paying attention to the song suddenly knocked on the door of the rest of my consciousness. "'Ere boss, take a look at this, got sumthin' I fink you'll appreciate 'ere" it said (the music bit of brain is a small cockney man). Immediately I was googling who was speaking and what about. The words had clung to me, the low yet passionate tone of the speaker enticing and requiring further investigation.
It turns out that it's from a monologue in an interview with Richard Feynman (which you can see here or read here), a monologue which I have been unable to escape since reading it and had rather a good argument with a housemate over. Feynman was a world renowned Physicist, specialising in the really cutting edge end of things. We're talking the 'path integral formulation of quantum mechanics', the 'theory of quantum electrodynamics', and the 'physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium' and many more things that my brain can only read as white noise (thank you Wikipedia for an afternoon of confusion). We owe a lot of modern day theories to his work.
Now in the usual archetype this does not feel like the type of man to make one of the most profound statements on the perception of beauty that I have ever heard in my admittedly brief blip of a life. Yet in that sentence I have just written is the crux of his own statement. Why shouldn't he be the sort of person to understand beauty? Why does the fact that he is a physicist and not a painter mean that he cannot comprehend aesthetic pleasure in the same, if not more, profound manner. Why are Science and Creativity so regularly separated as being mutually exclusive?
The two are split at school, we are often made to choose (or simply forced) between being 'Science focused' or 'Creative focused' at a young age. The art schools and science schools are split at university, combined degrees between say Physics and Art History would be ridiculed. Creatives are removed from scientific employments fields, scientists removed from creative recruitment pools because the perception is that they would add very little to either field.
Yet I would argue that a scientist is as much of an artist as a painter is, as able to appreciate the beauty in the every day. "Take it apart and it becomes dull", yet does it? As Feynman says, the beauty in a flower is not just because of its colour. It is also the billions of fascinating, terrifyingly time consuming processes that brought this colour to the fore that adds to that beauty tenfold. Also the implications of this colour are arguably more fascinating as it isn't only the flower that this effects. Running with Feynman's example we then can infer from this that Bees can see colour. Most large, complex mammals can't see colour, yet fluffy little honey making bees can and in their own way are drawn to the most attractive colours, that is beautiful. From here we move to the processes of the bee, did you know that bees are electrically charged? This is one of the reasons why they are fluffy, as they fly through the air they bump into particles which produces a static charge, then when they land in a flower the pollen they are collecting literally jumps to stick to them as it is oppositely charged, I mean.... if that's not one of the most beautiful and fascinating thoughts then I don't know what is. This is all still on a visual plane as well.
If we pull the flower apart and zoom in it remains beautiful. A cell for example is effectively a carefully planned small town in and of itself. A tiny little Milton Keynes. Each region has particular specialisations and jobs to do, creating and maintaining its own economy of energy. It's joked on the internet that 'Mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell' is one of the few things we learnt at school, but it's true! In each cell there's this little power station that converts resources carefully gathered by proteins and other cells into energy so that other regions of the cell can carry out their assigned tasks all the while fighting off invasions from foreign bodies, creating new cells, carrying out specialist operations and so on and so on. The cohesion is breathtaking. Further down there's DNA, a series of proteins so small we only discovered them in the 50s and yet these tiny little strands of molecules decide what colour our hair is?! Down and down we can go to atomic levels and the image never stops being stunning, even an atom is like a planet with many tiny moons fizzing in complicated orbits that create the building blocks of every piece of matter in existence, how is that not utterly incredible and therefore beautiful? This isn't even to mention going macro into astrophysics. There is a whole complicated universe on every level of perception, all it requires is a bit of imagination and it becomes... beautiful.
Which brings me on to my final and most important point which is imagination. Creativity requires imagination. Science and mathematics require logic and rules. This is what the cliche is and it is the fundamental argument in the separation of the two, and of course the argument of Mr. Feynman's painter friend. Bollocks to it. Some of the most imaginative people in the world are scientists. The difference is that scientists imagine something to be real and then they go and prove that it is or isn't. The imagination that Steven Hawking needed to create his theories on Black Holes is astronomical (ha), the fact that he then backed it up with complicated mathematics is no different to JRR Tolkein backing up the Lord of the Rings trilogy with the Silmarillion or the creation of the Elvish language. Einstein could not have begun to deduce the existence of relativity if he had not been able to imagine it in the first place. Science is converting imagination into fact, it is proving that we live in a universe dreamt up by mad men who claim we are made of stars. It is looking up at the sky and discovering nebulae, black holes, neutron stars and going "that is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen" not only because it looks like God took a paintbrush to a black canvas but because the mechanisms that put it there ask questions that are just as exciting as the thing itself. As Feynman concludes: "All kinds of interesting questions which [having] 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." There cannot be a separation of creativity and science, one can only add to the other.
The 'Rosette' or 'Rose' Nubula, the Beauty of the Flower.