The Most Beautiful Molecule

or,

The Aesthetic Moment in Chemistry

Carl Trindle

Chemistry Department

University of Virginia

July 21, 1999

 

Sustenance first, then the mind

It may be steep and deep, but climbing gear is NOT required!

Unweaving the Rainbow:

Is Science Hostile to Beauty?

Professor Trindle discussed many views of beauty. He included examples from mathematics, physics, chemistry, quotes from such diverse sources as Boltzmann and Feynman,  areas such as symmetry and chaos,  the practical, the esoteric, and materials from lichens to Buckey Balls to broken glass. We are left with no doubt that not only is science not hostile to beauty, but, indeed, science enhances beauty and expands the normal definitions.

For most men, an ignorant enjoyment is better than an informed one;...
                            Ruskin On Painting

The beauty that is there for you is also there for me, too. But I see a deeper beauty that isn't so readily available to others. I can see complicated interactions of the flower...
                            Remember Richard Feynman

[The scientist does] not study science because it is useful to do so... [but rather] studies it because he takes pleasure in it; and he takes pleasure in it because it is beautiful. If nature were not beautiful, it would not be worth knowing, and life would not be worth living... I mean the intimate beauty that comes from harmonious order of its part and which a pure intelligence can grasp.
                                H. Poincare

This shuddering before the beautiful, this incredible fact that a discovery motivated by a search after the beautiful in mathematics should find its exact replica in Nature, persuades me to say that beauty is that to which a human mind responds at its deepest and most profound.
                                S. Chandrasekhar

In short, the same thing happens with molecules as with the cupolas of cathedrals or the arches of bridges. And it is also possible that the explanation is neither remote nor metaphysical. To say "beautiful" is to say "desirable", and ever since man has built he has wanted to build at the smallest expense and in the most durable fashion, and the aesthetic experience he enjoys when contemplating his work comes afterward.
                                Primo Levi, The Periodic Table