You know how some people say that they know “just enough” of this or that “to be dangerous”? Despite a bachelor’s degree in philosophy, I can’t say that I’ve ever felt that I’d met the lofty standard of philosophical dangerousness. Having said that, I know enough to recognize a good question when I bump into one. And every once in a while, I generate a descent philosophical question of my own.
Most often, my professional curiosity bends in an arc more practical than theoretical. When I know that someone has made it through a stout ordeal with a measure of equanimity, or even joy, I like asking, “How’d you do that?” I can’t help but notice how frequently those answers circle back to themes of beauty. Daily practices of noticing beauty, and savoring it, tend to produce happiness and resilience in their practitioners. What’s more, I’m amazed by the fact that the experience of beauty (as opposed to glamor) is not the private property of just an elite few. You don’t need to summit the guru’s mountain, or Maslow’s steep hierarchy of needs to get to it. Beauty is always and everywhere universally available. In fact, I’m blown away by how frequently you hear a story of how beauty sustained someone during a life or death ordeal (see Lawrence Gonzalez’s, Deep Survival) or even the death camps of WWII (see Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning).
Which takes me to the philosophical question, that for this week, will put the “Sunday” into the Sunday Morning Café. “What is it about Beauty that makes it so accessible?
I recently bumped into an author that took up this question from an unexpected angle. Zubia Hasan was still a lowly college student studying physics at Johns Hopkins University when her essay “The Beauty in Physics” was published. In his sixth century Rule for monastic life, Saint Benedict saw to it that space was reserved at the table for the youngest monks’ voices to be heard. As if the Academy of Physicists functioned that way, Hasan’s 2020 paper issued a challenge to her colleagues young and old. The project she laid on the table was nothing short of rephrasing physics, not just so that laypeople can understand it. No, her call was to frame physics into language that demonstrated its “terrifying beauty.”
She described how the equations of physics revealed deeper and deeper meaning “showcasing the symmetry in nature.” Revealing “the beauty of the world.” For her, the terrifying beauty of physics not limited to (nor primarily found in) galaxy-sucking black holes, or earth-destroying particles. It’s the beauty of how mundane experiences that we take for granted, are actually profoundly complex. Classical mechanics provides a language of equations for her that opens up the “mind-blowing” reality that is always and everywhere hidden in plain sight. “Physics,” according to Hasan, is “simply trying to understand the beauty in our world more fully and precisely.”
I don’t know this brilliant scientist’s spiritual background. Like many other scientists, she may find the concepts and language of religiosity too confining to find a home in a church, temple, or synagogue. However, I recognize in her reflections something that a mystic from any religious tradition would find completely familiar to them. I want to close this essay by simply allowing her to speak for herself. Might I recommend that you approach these sentences the way you would approach a poem, allowing a word or phrase to slowly surface and percolate inside of you:
Physics has been an exercise in feeling stupid and being okay feeling stupid, because of course, you are going to be stupid compared to the genius of nature. Perhaps we need to normalize feeling stupid.
Perhaps sitting with the feeling of not knowing is the greatest feeling you can have as a human being because it reminds us of our position in the world. We can try and try to describe what we see—through math, poetry, or prose, but at the end of the day, our language as human beings is limited, our imaginations inhibited.
We are only describers, cheaply trying to imitate what already exists, and physics is a powerful, powerful reminder of that. That is the terrifying beauty about physics, that is the terrifying beauty of even the mundane, the un-mysterious and the everyday.
(Hasan, Zubia. “The Beauty in Physics,” Oct. 17, 2020).
Dialogue
What stood out for you in this essay? How did it challenge you?
How do you understand the normalization of “feeling stupid?”
How do you understand “the feeling of not knowing is the greatest feeling you can have as a human being because it reminds us of our position in the world.”?
Can you think of an experience when the mundane suddenly seemed not so mundane after all?
When have you experienced a “terrifying beauty?”