Chapter One: Beauty and the Beast
What is beauty? What is it that makes certain works of art, pieces of music, landscapes, or the face of a person so appealing to us that they give us an enormous sense of excitement and pleasure? This question, with which many philosophers, writers, psychologists, artists, and biologists have struggled at least since the time of Plato, and which led (among other things) to the birth of the notion of aesthetics in the eighteenth century, is still largely unanswered. To some extent, all of the classical approaches to beauty can be summarized by the following (clearly oversimplified) statement: Beauty symbolizes a degree of perfection with respect to some ideal. It is strange, though, that something which has such an abstract definition can cause such intense reactions. For example, some accounts claim that the Russian writer Dostoyevsky sometimes fainted in the presence of a particularly beautiful woman.
In spite of some changes in taste over the centuries (and some obvious differences among different cultures), the perception of what is beautiful is very deeply rooted in us. It suffices to look at a few paintings like Botticelli’s Primavera or Leighton’s Flaming June, or at a majestic mountain landscape, to realize this.
The term beautiful has evolved from being identified with “good” and “real” or “truthful” in ancient Greece to a quality that is confined merely to its effects on our senses, in the second half of the eighteenth century. It is interesting to note, though, that the approach of the philosophical book of Proverbs in the Bible has been rather dismissive and closer to the more modern definition in its assertion: “Charm is deceitful, and beauty is vain.”
But, even if only affecting our senses, the effects of beauty should not be underestimated. The ancient Greeks certainly did not underestimate them. Greek mythology contains the famous story of the goddess Eris, who, insulted because she was not invited to the wedding party of King Peleus and the sea nymph Thetis, decided to take revenge by throwing into the banquet hall a golden apple that carried this inscription: “For the Fairest.” After a long debate among the goddesses, the choice was narrowed down to three contestants for the title: the goddesses Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite. The matter was brought for a decision to Zeus who (very wisely) passed the task on to Paris, the son of the King of Troy. As it turned out, Paris’s job was reduced to an evaluation of the bribes offered to him by each of the goddesses.
Hera whispered to him that she would make him the Lord of Europe and Asia; Athena promised him victory over the Greeks; and Aphrodite made him an offer he could not refuse-she promised him that the most beautiful woman in the entire world would be his. Paris gave the apple to Aphrodite, an action that can only be described as a mistake of historic proportions. The most beautiful woman on earth was Menelaus’s wife, Helen, whose face “could launch a thousand ships.” The end of the story is tragic. After Paris kidnapped Helen and brought her to Troy, a fierce and bitter war broke out, which led eventually to the total destruction of Troy.
Helen’s beauty is described as being so intense, and its effects so devastating, that when Menelaus decides to execute Helen, a Trojan hero’s mother forces him to swear that he will perform the execution without looking into Helen’s eyes, because “through the eyes of men she controls them and destroys them in the same way that she destroys cities.”
Some speculate that Helen’s beauty was of the cold, unapproachable type, and that its overwhelming effects stemmed from the fact that Helen appeared as unattainable as the understanding of the concept of beauty itself.
Sometimes one can understand a certain concept or quality better by examining something that epitomizes the opposite. This notion is partly responsible for such pairings as heaven and hell, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, and, indeed, as the title of this chapter implies, Beauty and the Beast. So far I have only discussed beauty, but where is the “beast”?
The beast, in this case, is-physics! To many of my personal friends and to a large number of students of humanities whom I have met over the years, there is nothing more remote from the notion of beauty and more antithetical, from the point of view of the sensation that it induces in them, than physics. In fact, the disgust and fear that physics stimulates in some people is rivaled only by their feelings toward cockroaches. In an article in the Sunday Times (quoted in a BBC lecture by Richard Dawkins), columnist A. A. Gill compared observations in the sky to movie and theater stars by saying, “There are stars and there are stars, darling. Some are dull, repetitive squiggles on paper, and some are fabulous, witty, thought-provoking …” Believe it or not, those “dull, repetitive squiggles” represented the discovery of pulsars, objects so dense that one cubic inch of their matter weighs a billion tons, and that take a fraction of a second to rotate, instead of the earth’s twenty-four hours!
I hope that this book will convince even sceptics that “beauty in physics and cosmology” is not an oxymoron.
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