Beauty & Science

I am of firm belief that without science, there is no beauty. Though beauty can be subjective, it is still a unique ability for humans to perceive beauty in different forms. In thinking about science relating to beauty, I began to wonder about the science of beauty; why do humans perceive beauty, what determines whether something is beautiful or not, and can there be objective beauty? 

In an article from website brainpickings.org, author Nancy Etcoff discusses the notion of manufactured beauty, that is, essentially the presentation of repeated characteristics in reality-adjacent elements. Etcoff’s book is quoted saying “Walt Disney created our fondness for creatures with big eyes and little limbs, or Coca-Cola or McDonald’s created our cravings for sweet or fatty foods. Advertisers and businessmen help to define what adornments we wear and find beautiful, but … this belongs to our sense of fashion, which is not the same thing as our sense of beauty.” Humans come to believe these things to be beautiful and look for the same qualities in the things in everyday life which these things are similar to. To me, this is an entirely different conversation worth considering, but not quite what the goal of my research was.

She goes on to reference a psychology study which determined it takes just 150 milliseconds for humans to judge the beauty of the things they see, noting that even if we remember nothing about the details of what was seen, we will still remember whether that thing was beautiful or not. In terms of gauging the beauty of people, it is commonly known that beauty comes with symmetry, proportionality, shape, and nonabrasive to the eye. Of course, there is much more within all of these categories, but if humans judge beauty based on these, we must apply the same principles to the beauty of everything else, right? 

In an article from philosophynow.org, Marilyn Kane quotes Henri Poincaré, who said that scientists study nature because they take pleasure in it, and they take pleasure in it because it is beautiful. He argues that without beauty, life would not be worth living because we would no longer take pleasure in anything. In the end, it seems that beauty occurs when we perceive harmony of the elements at play, whether that is in the proportions, the colors, the sounds, or anything else. This harmony can be found in unlimited and unimaginable ways and not only does it affect science, but it is fundamentally formed with science itself.




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