Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman, on the beauty of a flower:
I have a friend who’s an artist and he’s 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. And he says, “You see, as 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 esthetically as he is, that I can appreciate the beauty of the 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 — one centimeter — there is also beauty at a smaller dimension, the inner structure.
Also the processes — the fact that the colors in the flower are 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 esthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it esthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which a 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.
That was from a 1981 interview on the BBC program Horizon. The interview was broadcast in the United States in 1983, on the PBS science program Nova. That’s where I saw it. It’s hard to pick one favorite Feynman story, but I do enjoy the first chapter of his memoir, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! The story is called “He Fixes Radios By Thinking!”
With science under attack from religious zealots, Feynman’s worldview is a breath of fresh air.
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