Wonder
Wonder
Ricki Tarr @[email protected]
There is this strange idea, that if we understand the facts or science behind how something works, we will lose our sense of wonder. But this has never felt true for me, understanding prisms doesn't take away the beauty of a rainbow, understanding evolution doesn't negate the miracle of our existence. The Universe is a magical place, and the more I learn, the more my wonder deepens.
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I have a friend who’s an artist and has sometimes taken a view which I don’t agree with very well. He’ll hold up a flower and say “look how beautiful it is,” and I’ll agree.
Then he says “I as an artist can see how beautiful this is but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing,” and I think that he’s kind of nutty. First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too, I believe. Although I may not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is … I can appreciate the beauty of a flower.
At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. I mean it’s not just beauty at this dimension, at one centimeter; there’s also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, also the processes.
The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which 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.
-Richard Feynman
It only subtracts for those with less knowledge, to many of those people are content with being ignorant. And for the ignorant, there’s nothing they enjoy more than overcompensating and trying to drag others down to their level.
As someone who went to art school, a fairly common view that artists have is that they have a unique view of the world and can see it in a way others cannot. Maybe that's true, but then the thinking goes that the way others see the world is inferior, and I think there's nothing further from the truth than that. Everyone sees beauty in different ways.
Too many artists perceived the world in us vs them terms. Art or science. Too this I say: da Vinci. He considered himself an engineer, not an artist but married both in a fascinating way.
(Educated in fine arts myself, but damn if I don't love science, logic and even a good snippet of code every now and then)
I’m not educated in fine arts. As a scientist, my biggest criticism of artists (particularly those with formal education) is when they insist that the art is contained within the mind of the person viewing it.
There were two sentences that completely transformed my appreciation of modern art (and I’m using that as a very general, layman’s version of the term). The first was “liberating paint from representationalism.” The idea that you could explore visual dimensions in color, shading, geometry, texture and so on without having to make it look like people at a picnic was really interesting to me. That there was a very deliberative and exploratory side to applying paint to canvas for some reason never really occurred to me, even though I studied literature in addition to science and had been developing a sense of the craft of prose and poetry.
The second was a statement from Jackson Pollock on his transformation from realism to abstract art. During the Depression (I know you know this, but I’m clarifying my experience of understanding), Pollock painted in a style I believe is called social realism. A lot of the art done via WPA (the depression-era government work program) showed average people living their lives and doing their jobs. Without getting too deeply into it, that was the aesthetic. After WWII, Pollock said something along the lines of representationalism having no place in a world with nuclear weapons. It was a horror beyond the ability of an artist to depict. He moved into non-representational works as a result. As someone who (at the time) was working in the defense industry with strategic weapons systems and plans, that also really resonated with me.
My point is that without those and other, later insights from people educated in art and art history, I’d have no framework for appreciation. It’s like reading Shakespeare with no knowledge of literature. At best, you can get a surface level of appreciation based on what you’ve seen in movies or read in modern novels, but there’s a vast dimensionality that you’re simply not equipped to notice.
When we see a flower or the exotic plumage of a bird, we can only see what evolution has equipped us to see. Other than the cases where we as humans have taken over the role of natural selection and started breeding for our own aesthetic purposes, we don’t generally realize that those beautiful things have evolved for reasons completely apart from what we see, and that they might look completely different to the species they evolved for.
I actually like it when someone with an arts background can take a painting I like and tell me why it’s a cringe-filled collection of tropes. I might even continue to like it, but I do want to know I’m looking at Goosebumps and not War and Peace.
Thank you and everyone else that contributed to such a lovely comment chain. I had a great time and learned new things but I also really appreciated your respectful and different perspectives. Art really does bring us together doesn't it?
Da Vinci is a great example. There is science in art, and art in science.
And there is art in fart
Science 1, art 0.
You can't spell fart without it!
Heck, science has shown that some flowers are even more dramatically colored outside our visible spectrum!
I recently watched a YouTube about the nature of reality and how bees, for example, see flowers’ colors invisible to us (not that color actually exists, but that’s an adjacent topic), and the video colorized a white flower to show what might see; absolutely stunning.
@Maeve @RickiTarr @ReadyUser31 @charonn0 @snooggums Send a link if you find it!
I know it's just a Mastodon thing, but it looks like you're summoning a squad of friends to help you find it.
@Sotuanduso my peeps 🥹
I’m not sure if this was it or not: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HU6LfXNeQM4
It may have been one titled “hacking reality,” but I’m not logged in, but I highly recommend either of those videos, flower or not.
@Maeve oh, great - thanks :o)
My pleasure.
@Maeve @ReadyUser31 @charonn0 @snooggums Oh that sounds really cool!
@Maeve @RickiTarr @ReadyUser31 @charonn0 @snooggums This was one of my favorite episodes of 3-2-1 Contact back in the day!