Post 5

What is it about nature and the things that make it up that cause us to feel or say that it is beautiful? One answer that Ralph Waldo Emerson offers is that “the simple perception of natural forms is a delight. Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American essayist, lecturer, and poet who led the transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century, and believed the beauty of nature can have a profound effect upon our senses.
“When we think of beauty in nature, we might most immediately think of things that spark the senses, the existence of a mountain, the expanse of the sea, the death of a flower. Often it is usually the image of these things itself, which gives us pleasure, and this emotional or affective response on our part seems to be crucial to our experience of beauty.” Humans appreciate a wide range of entities aesthetically whether it is in painting, sculpture, music, opera, theatre, literature, design and buildings but also faces, flowers, landscapes, food, machinery, habitats and various objects of everyday life. Most often we find these things to be beautiful not because of something else they might bring us like a piece of furniture, but because of the way that the forms of these things immediately strike us once we look at them. Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder, which causes everyone to have a different definition of what beautiful is.
Scientists have their own definition of beauty. It's the beauty in nature that leads scientist to wonder how these objects, themes, and elements of nature come to be. Humans are attracted to some things more than others, and with that attraction leads to wonder.
In nature we observe growth and development in living things. To scientists the definition of beauty depends on the field of science. An example of nature and beauty in science is chemistry and biology. Images of chemical structures and and line drawings of 3D molecules are so intricate that it entraps someone in to explore it even more. Another example that majorly influences science is symmetry, whether it's in the human form or natural, humans are attracted to symmetricality. Botanists are interested in the structure, genetics, and ecology of plants. The list can go on and on, but the reasoning as to why scientist are researching these elements is because of the nature and beauty of it.

Beauty is so expansive that anyone can find it in anything. When people think of just the general word “science” the  thought of beauty doesn't necessarily come to mind but once you look deeper into the different fields of science you begin to notice elements of beauty. Whether talking about a human artifact or a natural organism, any increase of ability to achieve its end or goal is an increase in beauty.  


https://green.harvard.edu/news/beauty-nature

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