Beauty and Science
By: Professor Tanya Monro
From: TEDx Adelaide, Adelaide Town Hall, 21 November 2015
What is beauty? A Google search of the word delivers reams of images of perfectly airbrushed young
female faces. So much does our society link beauty with happiness that it’s big business. Vast
varieties of products cover up our perceived imperfections and we’re constantly bombarded with
unrealistic images of perfect people that only exist as a result of sophisticated computer software.
I put together this talk while listening to Mozart’s requiem, a work that for me crystallizes the
essence of beauty – that glimpse of something very much more than yourself. For others, beauty
might be found in a sequence of moves in a soccer match, a well-tended garden, the taste of a wellaged red or the gurgle of a contented baby.
While we all experience beauty in different things, the sensations we experience are fairly universal
- that rapid intake of breath, hairs standing on end or that speeding up of pulse that happens when
you experience something that pleases the senses. Beauty inspires us, leaving a lasting impression.
From the galaxy with its perfect spiral arms formed from 100 billion stars to the stained glass in
Notre Dame’s cathedral to the seeds of a sunflower to the microscope image of optical fibre with
microscopic holes in its cross-section – all of these beautiful images share is symmetry and pattern.
But as soon as we try to define beauty it gets slippery and we are struck by beauty that defies
definitions.
So one way of thinking about beauty is that it is the act of perceiving something that triggers this
physical response. Given we all bring different perspectives and personal history to the act of
perceiving it isn’t surprising that it’s often said that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
Let’s have a look at some other perspectives on beauty.
Plato saw the changing physical world as a poor, decaying copy of a perfect, rational, eternal, and
changeless original. This makes beauty almost seem a mathematical construct – perfect in its
accuracy, something that is hard to represent using real world objects.
Historian George Bancroft said “Beauty itself is but the sensible image of the infinite”. But hang on…
isn’t that a pretty good definition of science?
Science and beauty are inextricably intertwined.
When I was a child I was determined that I would be a cellist when I grew up. However something
happened in my teens that shaped my life and turned me into a cello and piano-playing scientist.
It was in a physics class, age 15, when thanks to a really amazing physics teacher with a thick Scots
accent I started to be able to see the extraordinarily simple yet powerful connections between
maths and our physical world. To that point maths had been a wonderful game that I enjoyed to
play – the world of numbers, pattern, geometry and abstract reasoning can be both beautiful and
mesmerizing. When it is applied to the world around us via the scientific method it gives us the
power it gives us to make predictions and to understand all the processes that drive everything from
the expansion of the universe to the interactions of sub-atomic particles.
For me this realisation came with pretty simple physics – realising that it wasn’t necessary to learn
the equations of motion to predict the motion of a projectile – distance, velocity and acceleration –
but that you could work out one from another by using the tools of calculus. Being able to
understand nature using the tools of mathematics is at once liberating and excitingly creative and
thing of beauty. Liberating because it stops being a matter of remembering seemingly dislocated
facts and becomes a matter of constructing reality from a bridge of logic aided by the language of
mathematics.
So what is science? The first thing most people think about when it comes to science is dry
procedures followed step by step as if by a robot. Sadly this type of “science” experience turns many
off staying with the subject. Science, at its heart, is the art of asking questions, or hypotheses, that
allow us to advance human knowledge. Answering the questions isn’t the hard bit – it’s asking the
right ones that is distinguishes the extraordinary science from the pedestrian.
Have a look at this tiny taste from a competition I ran this year. At UniSA we strive to do research
that’s inspired by opportunities and challenges, partnered with end-users and communities and
underpinned by excellence. We sought arresting images that would make you want to stop and find
out more. From understanding how blood and lymphatic vessels attach to our intestines, to
exploring vulnerable environments or understanding how sunscreens absorb UV light, images such
as these make the sometimes inaccessible world of research much more immediate.
You might not be surprised to learn that my children are musicians too. And scientists, just as most
children are. Just the other day I observed Master 9 walking around the house exciting everyday
objects with a vibrating tuning fork to see which ones made the loudest sounds. A clock with a
circular frame won the day. The scientific explanation is that the circular shape allowed the
vibrations to resonate for longer and the domed plastic front allowed sound to project effectively
into the room. This self-driven voyage of discovery is what scientists do every day in their chosen
field – who wouldn’t want the lived experience of joy and creative freedom that comes with
discovery?
There’s no question that we desperately need more and more diverse people skilled in Science,
Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. We are increasingly becoming reliant on technology in
our everyday lives, and less skilled workers are ever more rapidly being replaced by technological
solutions.
But right now too many young people are put off science. One of the most important things we
need to transform is teaching– it needs to again become a prestigious professional role that attracts
our best and brightest, and is well regarded and remunerated. We need scientists and
mathematicians with advanced training in their fields working with our children and not those who
are trained in teaching pedagogy alone. Every award-winning scientist I know was inspired by an
outstanding teacher.
Sometimes we stumble upon beautiful things we can only understand using science. Observe the
Lycurgus Cup of 4th century Rome looks red when lit from behind and green when lit from in front
or the fabulously iridescent colours of the butterfly. What do they have in common? Well as it turns
out when the ancient Romans were heating the glass in preparation for making this fabulous goblet
they did so in a gold crucible that left its traces in the glass in the form of tiny gold nanoparticles.
And the butterfly has evolved nanoscale patterns on its wings. In both cases it’s the interaction of
light with the sub-wavelength-scale patterns that causes these extraordinary optical effects.
Learning from nature and from the accidents of history we can now control the way photons are
generated and transported by deliberately introducing patterns to tailor and manipulate light. These
images are from my research. They are cross-sections of new classes of optical fibres. The black
features you can see are air holes so small that they can only be viewed with a powerful microscope.
Each image tells is its own story – each has been designed and developed to solve a practical
problem – from sensing the quality of wine to detecting ionising radiation and generating new
colours of light. And I think they are also a thing of beauty.
Science also gives us the chance to explore and understand things we cannot grasp with our senses
and gives us the insights we need to be able to make critical decisions for our future. This wonderful
video has been constructed from billions of calculations performed on Australia’s supercomputer in
Canberra. It allows us to “see” ocean temperatures, depth and salinity and how they vary with the
season around the world. Not only are the rippling eddies and patterns mesmerizing and beautiful,
but such models allow us to explore the impact of climate change on marine life and human
habitation.
Renaissance men such as Galileo Galilei and Leonardo da Vinci spanned fields from engineering to
astronomy. Since then we have increasingly specialized into narrow fields of research that become
siloed by virtue of their distinctive language, culture and values. While this has allowed
extraordinary gains in knowledge, it is preventing us from solving many of the problems that the
real world gives us.
Working with researchers from fields such as materials science, to biology and medicine I have been
privileged to be able to harness physics to work on questions as diverse as: How can we process
information using light? How can we listen to cells within a living human body? Can an aircraft tell
you that it is rusting from inside?
By creating teams of researchers that span disciplines it is now becoming possible to ask questions
that previously could not even have been formulated and to solve real world problems that rarely
respect the boundaries of our scientific disciplines.
Our future economic prosperity requires us to get a whole lot better at translating science into
societal and economic outcomes. While Australia is near the top of the OECD league tables for our
scientific publications, we are at the very bottom for translating it into impact. If we want to change
this we need to encourage and support our researchers, businesses and indeed all potential endusers of research to partner, and we need to build a culture that encourages entrepreneurship – all
too often we shy away from the possibility of failure. We need more people with science training in
business and government and not just in laboratories.
Let’s make Australia and South Australia a place where science and beauty come together to power
our culture and stimulate exciting new industries, creating high value jobs and opportunities for our
children and solutions for our changing world.
It is sheer joy to be able to use our understanding of the physical world to develop a theoretical
framework for understanding things we observe and then to use these models as tools to make
predictions. Such tools give us extraordinary freedom to be creative – to simply play with the
universe a come up with new concepts and to push the limits of the possible. And where it gets
really exciting is when this creativity is applied to real practical problems to create disruptive
technologies that truly change the way we do things.