Blog 5

I started thinking about our Art and Science textbook for this prompt and found this quote in the beginning by Federico Mayor. She notes that “it is this invitation to share beauty that embodies the true act of a genius” (Art and Science, p. 7). She is referring to a musical performance, calling the entire experience beautiful. I think many times when someone experiences beauty they ask themselves how? In art, someone may come across a painting they find beautiful but are dumbstruck as to how the artist accomplished the work. In another way, nature is considered beautiful, and the desire to know more about it influences people to ask questions and start exploring. For example, stars in the sky are aesthetically beautiful, but are also mysterious and hard to understand. In this way their beauty influences people's attention and desire to know more about them.

Beauty holds an aesthetic as well as conceptual meaning. In regards to nature, almost everyone will agree that it holds beauty in its visual experience. In science, coming to a discovery, or completing a project can produce a beautiful experience or moment that doesn't necessarily carry aesthetic beauty.

I think that typical notions of beauty are standardized and integrated into our everyday visual experience of the world. Watching the sunset is one example. A more problematic example would be looking at images of models, in which case the standard idea of beauty is perpetuated by media and capitalism. Regardless, beauty comes in so many different forms. One’s notion of nature and beauty influences science by igniting curiosity. Experiencing and seeing nature as beautiful raises questions, at least for myself I often wonder how rock formations form or what causes ocean current. This is a curiosity that can lead to investigation and allow us to see the world in new and innovative ways. There is beauty in this notion renewal or originality. There is also beauty in breaking things down to its most pure form, like images of fractals or microscopic images of snowflakes.

Image result for microscopic snowflakes fractals
Image result for discovering exoplanets

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