Feynman on Beauty

Dear Feynman,

Your description - like always ! - is extremely heartfelt and beautiful.

Your point of view is the essence of openness. I would humbly like to add a point not explicitly mentioned. That is the element of habit. As you say, the aesthetic beauty of the flower is available to the human any time he so wishes. Then, how can he fail to see - as a scientist - the aesthetic beauty of a flower ? The danger is - if I were to take the side of your artist friend - that the scientist might get so habituated to the scientific way of thinking that it may sometimes become hard for him or her to sort of suspend that mode while experiencing the common beauty of the flower. This I put forth based on personal experience and from observing other scientists too. This is exactly what most of the humour in The Big Bang Theory - a TV series, not what we as physicists think usually ! - is based upon.

I have felt (and it has been and is being demonstrated empirically) that the human brain has qualitatively different modes of thought and experience. It is to the imbalance in using these modes that your friend might reasonably react. And for some reason, I am certain that you've recognized this point even when you say you don't understand how scientific knowledge can subtract from the appreciation of beauty. For it can not. Overdone scientific habit can. Similarly, the knowledge of art, artistic thinking and history of human aesthetics can only add to the appreciation of beauty. And similarly too, overdone artistic habit can subtract. To the credit of the curiousness of the scientist, he or she feels a lesser need to ask this question of other thinkers and doers such as artists. And it is a curious historical fact that we as scientists have been most asked this question as almost an accusation. Though the question in itself is interesting in all sorts of ways as you would say !

Your QED is still doing well, and you still are and always will be a phenomenon of Nature as you were in your time as a human on Earth. I wish I had met you in person.

yours truly,

Sumiran