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.
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About Richard Feynman
Richard Feynman was a 20th-century American theoretical physicist. Richard Phillips Feynman was an American theoretical physicist. He shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics with Julian Schwinger and Shin'ichirÅ Tomonaga "for their fundamental work in quantum electrodynamics (QED), with deep-ploughing consequences for the physics of elementary particles". Read more on Wikipedia →
Themes
- Knowledge — The pursuit of learning, understanding, and intellectual growth
- Philosophy — Deep thoughts on existence, knowledge, and the nature of reality
- Science — Discovery, inquiry, and the wonders of the natural world