Blog 5

When I first read this question my mind immediately jumped to plastic surgery. Of course this is not surprising at all considering it seems to be all my mind ever jumps to. In the realm of plastic surgery beauty and nature absolutely influence science. There are scientific studies done on what humans find most attractive in a face and how to prevent facial aging because facial aging is not seen as beautiful. These studies then lead to new surgical techniques in order to achieve such attractiveness. New inventions have stemmed from studies on beauty and what is found most attractive. For example breast implants would never have been invented if there was not an observed trend of people finding larger breasts more attractive. Science is also used to “correct” nature. Plastic surgery does really blur the line for me between science and art though. There are the surgical aspects such as what types of fillers or cannulas to use, but what the science is trying to accomplish pertains to beauty and nature. If you ask a plastic surgeon what their goal is for a procedure it is for it to end up looking beautiful and natural. 
                                                        
Beauty is a funny thing though because it really is in the eye of the beholder. Science is not that way. Or at least it is not supposed to be. Science is supposed to be factual, repeatable, and unfaltering. Beauty and nature are both subjective. Nature can change over time and so can beauty. Science is supposed to stay the same. I think that science can be beautiful. Just the other day in my organic chemistry lab we were learning to do TLC Chromatography. In order to see the results we had to place them under a UV light and when we did the paper lit up with markings unseeable to the human eye. 



We are all naturally curiosity driven creatures. I think that many scientists are driven to scientifically investigate things that they find in nature or find beautiful. For example the invention of the helicopter stemmed from someone watching a hummingbird and wondering how it could maintain a constant altitude. It examples such as this that prove beauty and nature influence science. Visualizations of science also prove that science itself is beautiful. i think all of these things will be proved in our upcoming project on visualizing science.


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