Friday, February 5, 2016

What a wonderful world!

"I see trees of green, red roses too,
I see them bloom, for me and you,
And I think to myself, what a wonderful world"

I remembered the opening lines of this Louis Armstrong classic, while reading about an interview with Nobel Prize winning physicist, Richard Feynman:

"I have a friend who’s an artist and has sometimes taken a view which I don’t agree with very well. He’ll hold up a flower and say “look how beautiful it is,” and I’ll agree. Then he says “I as an artist can see how beautiful this is but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing,” and I think that he’s kind of nutty. [...]
I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. I mean it’s not just beauty at this dimension, at one centimeter; there’s also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, also the processes. The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don’t understand how it subtracts."
( http://www.forbes.com/sites/chadorzel/2015/09/09/science-can-be-as-beautiful-as-art/#5a294fd55483)



I can understand that very well. Why not see the picture at the normal level, and then at the micro or nano level?


I would only add, whether it is at the nano scale, or the cosmic scale, "what a wonderful world"!


The first time I saw this NASA picture of NGC 6302, or "The butterfly Nebula" with its wingspan of 3 light years, I was struck by the beauty of it.


Imagine this huge nebula winging its way through the vast universe just like a little butterfly on earth!



(Image from: https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_2526.html)






Well, as an artist as well as a scientist, and one familiar with         butterflies on earth, and pictures of   nebulae in the cosmos, 
here is my artist's impression of the "Butterfly Nebula" in oil on canvas!

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