natural beauty

Last week a friend and I were talking about finding Nature.  Is a city a wasteland for a nature-lover?  That's a complicated question that triggered a series of thoughts.  Ultimately it depends on the person, but a few thoughts. 

 

In 1981 interview Richard Feynman talks about how he can appreciate a flower's beauty like an artist, but he can also appreciate a deeper beauty with his understanding of science.

There's both truth and arrogance in what he says.  My sister is an artist.  Over the years she's trained herself to see any number of visual relationships that can startle a non-artist like me.  I see some of them, particularly in her abstracts, but I'm missing quite a bit too.

 

But she's missing a lot too.  Our senses pass only a tiny amount of the information around us to our brain which, in turn, assembles a crude approximation of reality.  This virtual reality seems very rich and deep as it should.  It is, after all, reality to us.  We've learned to probe the real thing by observation with sensors that operate outside the limits of our own. Photographs in the near ultraviolet reveal patterns on flowers that some birds and insects use as a pollination cue.  You can look at your hand, a house or a running engine at wavelengths about fifteen times longer than our eyes are sensitive too and easily spot areas of hot and cold.  You can speed up or slow down time with time-lapse or high speed photography. Telescopes and microscopes let you see big things that are dim and far away and tiny things that you didn't know existed.  The list goes on and on. 

 

New observations have sometimes come with surprises that have forced new thinking about the nature of Nature.  There are aspects that are deeply beautiful.  We see some of them directly.  The parabolic arc a thrown ball travels.  The colors of a rainbow.  The intricacies of a spider web.  I've spent quite a bit of time thinking about what might be fundamental.  Certain relations that keep coming up in almost anything in Nature you examine in Nature's language of math.  Things that are beautiful.¹  It makes you wonder if, as a part of Nature, we've evolved to appreciate these beauties.  

 

But back to finding beauty.

 

I grew up in an extremely beautiful part of the world.  Jeri, Tom,  JoAnn and Jheri know it well.  Somewhat East of the Rockies in Montana (Alberta for Jheri).  Prairie and plain with a few smaller mountain ranges.  My parents would take us to the Bob, Glacier, Banff and Jasper several weeks each Summer.  After turning 15  it was okay to ride the dog up to East Glacier with my pack or take my bike over Going to the Sun. A lot of hiking, but especially watching the sky at night.  Enormous physical beauty even though my senses missed the vast majority. 

 

Since then I've lived mostly in urban or suburban areas.  At first I found myself pining for the mountains.  Gradually I  began to discover what Feynman said.  There's a beauty that comes from observation and it gets richer with understanding.  The ocean was very new to me when I was in California - mostly it was a destination on my bike ride.  No mountains in sight - in those days smog hid them if you faced East.  But then a professor friend asked if I could see regularity in the waves and pointed me to a book.  That was a major gateway drug.  I saw the mathematical beauty of the water before I could appreciate the beauty of the  ocean.  That came in time and I now have both.    It adds to what you can see and provides you questions to ask.  It is very much a lean forward experience.   

 

John Keats was disturbed by what he felt was the reductionism of science.  

Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
Philosophy will clip an Angel's wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomèd mine—
Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made

(from Lamia)

But understanding the nature of light and human vision adds a much deeper view with a beauty of its own.  For example you can get all of the colors of the rainbow from a single color of light merely by moving towards or away from the source at an appropriate speed in your mind.  You can start with a single color and reweave a rainbow. You can be encouraged to look for moonbows and appreciate why sun dogs form where they do.  After a bit of work you can discover for yourself that which you didn't know.

 

I'm taken with walks through a little wooded area near our place.  It isn't wilderness by any stretch of the imagination but I tend to go through around the same time of day most of the days I'm at home no matter what the weather.  After a few years I realized if I go by the trees, we really have six distinct seasons here.  I've seen the emergence of cycles that are longer than a year and am beginning to see the impact of global warming.  It has encouraged me to look and listen more deeply.  Microscopes, an ultrasonic converter to listen to bats, insects and mice, intrusion cameras to watch some of the animals and so on.  The coyotes and some of the deer know me and a vulture sometimes follows me on my walks.  It's a much richer place than I had imagined and I've learned more than I did when I lived near mountains.  Of course I'd be learning there too - just put in the time to observe and ask questions. 

 

There's variety in Nature if you can travel to  interesting areas.  It's a wonderful way to fuel curiosity and discovery if you have the resources.  But Nature is deep and everywhere.  Much deeper than any of us imagine.   A camera, portable microscope or binoculars may just be the gateway from almost anywhere.  It's just finding something curious.  It's so rich you can be captivated with or without math.  

 

You will see things you weren't capable of seeing before. 

__________

¹ I've probably written about some aspects of Nature that seem to be fundamentally beautiful.  It's pure conjecture, but I'd include relativity (not Einstein's - it's a subset), symmetry, invariance and complementarity. They seem to exist in art and music too.  Far too much to write about here, but a good topic for a walk. 

Comments

[Gregg Vesonder]

This exploration takes me back to one of my favorite if not the favorite course I ever attended. It was taught by Ernan McMullin a physicist/philosopher (if you are interested, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernan_McMullin). The course was called "Ways of Knowing" and was a course on Epistemology. The lasting impression I received from that course was how different disciplines see the world and how rich it all is when you try on the spectacles of the scientist, historian, comedian, ... . i have always seen Steve as the person who sees the world from many viewpoints and this post is essential Steve. I do wish I was a physicist and a psychologist because I admire the physicists' viewpoint, but would not trade it but add it. In this area multiplicity is a virtue.

[steve crandall]

and I wish I had just a tiny bit of Gregg's feeling for psychology. But that's why people get together and talk with folks with different backgrounds and interests, right?