Dec 2011, Bharatpur
A few of us, the CNPians, returned to room late in the evening on that cold winter day and sat around a campfire at our place of stay at Bharatpur. As usual the discussions turned to a topic of our interest in photography.
What is beauty?
Conversations started as expected - "beauty is subjective", "it can't be defined" etc,. It was a very spirited discussion (pun intended!). No one knew how to precisely define beauty, but for Shankar Kiragi!!
He kind of said (Shankar, correct me if I am wrong),
Beautiful things always exhibit symmetry, balance in structure, proportion, color balance etc. Some of us did not agree with him since we (let me speak for myself) felt such a definition was very closed and restrictive. A few of us argued vehemently with Shankar. The real beauty was at the end Shankar declared:
"you people may say whatever you like but I know what beauty is"!!
I just loved the conviction and clarity he had in his mind about this (I think) contentious topic.
7 years later, during past few months, I came across many discussions on Nature of Reality wherein several eminent nobel laureates seem to exactly echo what Shankar had told us then!! Symmetry, proportion, balance and conservation are the central theme that runs in nature of the Nature!! Some of the eminent scientists who are on their life's mission to unravel the mysteries of nature made it a point to look for theories with better symmetry and hence the beauty! When we don't have experimental evidence to understand how some aspects of nature works these nobel laureates seem to rely on the beauty/symmetry of the proposed hypothesis as a measure of its probable correctness!! Let me share a few of them here. The speakers in these talks are nobel laureates who dedicated their life to unravel the mysteries of nature.
Steven Weinberg
Frank Wilczek
David Gross and others. Listen to David Gross on the right (~14:19), he says "symmetry first"!
Here in CNP, in past we did have some image posts and discussions around symmetry/balance etc. For example here is one by Vipin, posted long ago.
(c) Vipin Baliga
I am very happy to note that we did then recognize nature's imperfect symmetry (click on the thumbnail above to read the discussion) which made the above image more 'beautiful'. Folks in the panel in 3rd video above make a very similar observation (around ~36:30)!!
I think, that small(?) part of the nature which breaks the symmetry gently is very mysterious! Or in other words
symmetry + "some mystery" = Nature?
What in nature causes that mystery? Is that a mystery which we can't understand?
Only symmetry is what we can comprehend and our theories which are devoid of these mysteries are only approximations of phenomenons in Nature?
What if we had three eyes instead of two? Would our notion of symmetry/beauty have changed then?
That said, please enjoy playing this below video:
Listen to the line around ~2:11.
It is very interesting to read
Fractal computer analysis section in Jackson Pollock's Wiki Page.
Let me end this with a question
Beauty of Nature - What can we say?