Beauty and Something Else

For some time I’ve been having conversations with friends about our possible contribution on bringing beauty out to the world, let it emerge and contaminate us while we are instruments of translation from a language yet to be fully discovered.

Recently I was reading a book [Theory U: Leading from the Future as it Emerges : Buy it on Amazon] where the author was asking people the question: how do you know that you know? How do I know that I know? I kept that on my mind for a second and quickly those conversations about allowing beauty to unfold in the world came to my mind.

Then I tried: I know that I know when the object of knowledge is beautiful, both through my lenses and to the eyes of the collective. Seemed a good beginning to my exploration. Why is beauty a successful criteria in choosing a correct path/theory/work? I translated the output of our conversations using these words: when beauty is playing, the sound resonates with our soul and give us energy to move forward; things happen to help us make them happen, just because beauty wants to keep on playing.

I also liked this video posted here. Recent movies about physics has been interpreted in a way that the human mind is a constructor of everything. Our brain, just as in the past, is the solution, controller and creator of every dumb thing around us, right? Hummm… I wonder if we’d be able to measure the ego of the human race one day.

What beauty emerging has to do with human beings?

There’s nothing to do with human beings although human beings are part of it. “It”? Is this what Gell-Mann calls “something else”? No, it’s not, but I believe that stands for a different reason: we don’t need to look for something else because this something has been here before us and will be after us. Maybe it’s a unified theory of physics plus accidents, maybe it’s God, but it’s certainly not supernatural, on the contrary, it is part of Natural that we don’t understand yet, and maybe never will.

Perhaps it means that beauty is the representative measure of natural truth. Another reason to do things beautifully. ;)

This is a story of Ptolemy, Copernicus and Kepler

While Ptolemy, with his earth-centered model, had to use 80 postulated circles to explain celestial motion, Copernicus – breaking with the idea of Earth being the center, but not yet with Aristotle’s idea of uniform circular motion – had those postulates down to 34.

Kepler (oh yes, this guy was extraordinary!) questioned Aristotle’s idea of “perfection” and found 3 mathematical laws that are simple and elegant representatives of the elliptical orbits of planets. He moved from perfection to simplicity – his assumption was that God had created the universe according to simple numerical patterns.

Sir Isaac Newton would come later unifying terrestrial and celestial motion. Even more elegant.

Then Coulomb… then Maxwell…

This original post was written on Jan 11, 2008 – I have been reading the book below and reconsidering the conversations about bringing beauty and creativity to the world.