Camel Cuties

We humans are very conscious of appearances. We focus on looks and the outward show, when we gaze upon things—whether other people, animals, or architecture. People will go to great lengths to appear attractive—by buying expensive clothes, applying gobs of makeup, getting breast enhancement operations, going on extreme diets, etc. We hold beauty contests—for us humans, for our domestic animals, for our cars, for our gardens. You might say we're obsessed with good looks.

We claim to esteem various sayings that belie our fixation about appearances, such as “Beauty is only skin deep,” or “Don't judge a book by its cover,” but we really just pay lip service to these aphorisms. We pretend that character and substance matter, but it's the façade that we really value.

We place such high priority on good looks that we often cheat in our beauty contests. Numerous scandals have occurred over the years—not unlike the doping scandals that happen in sports. But now we have the worst beauty scandal of all: Saudi camel owners cheating in the annual King Abdulaziz Camel Festival.
 
I have to admit, being an American, that I regard a camel as one of the more unsightly creatures around. But I wouldn't be surprised if a Saudi thought an American opossum or raccoon was ugly as sin. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, as they say, and Saudis behold their camels as lovely.

Saudi Arabia's King Abdulaziz Camel Festival is big business. Some 30,000 camels compete for over $30 million in prize money. That's a strong incentive to doll up your favorite dromedary to be as cute as possible—in fact, maybe even cross the moral line to try to dupe the judges by cheating.

Some of the beauty marks camel judges have traditionally looked for are tallness, a long neck, a big head and nose, dangling lips, and droopy ears. A fraudulent owner can't do much about his camel's height or neck length, but there are other devious means that some are resorting to. For example, some use Botox on their camel's face, which makes it appear more “inflated”, so it appears to have that desired bigger head, droopy lips, and an inflated nose. Some owners will tie down their camel's lips before the competition, so they dangle more, or inject their lips with anesthetic, to cause them to sag. They'll even coat the critter's ears with oil so they droop more, due to the added weight. What's next, silicon injections?

The Saudi judges are catching on to this nefarious form of misrepresentation, however. They are coming up with better monitoring schemes and penalties. Violators can be fined and banned for several years from competition. We can only hope that the Saudi authorities successfully check this pernicious behavior.
 
I find it hard to understand this phenomenon, since I find camels to be quite homely critters. But let me say no more about dromedary droopy lips or ears, lest I contribute further to the gap between Christians and Muslims.

More Beautiful

An article in a September 2012 Guardian newspaper makes the case for, as its title describes, “Science is More Beautiful Than Art.” The point being made by the (science) writer is that science is bringing us ever more beautiful images, in the way of gorgeous and breathtaking photos from the Hubble Space Telescope, deep sea pictures, and recently-discovered exotic animals, for example. And, as if the photos are not stunning enough, he writes that science brings us mind-bending descriptions of quantum mechanics, insights into the wonders of deep space, and opens the beauty of the world of mathematics.

The article notes that, while art has traditionally demonstrated the beauty and higher workings of the human mind, science pushes our minds even further than art. It stimulates our imagination more.

I have pondered the point of this article in recent months, feeling a general sense of agreement, but still not quite buying it all. Given my science training and past research work, I have always had an interest in and sympathy with the sentiments of those who see lovely and charming things in science. I’ve always thought that science presents us elegant messages and theories—in the sense that they are both ingenious and simple. But science more beautiful than art?

Then it hit me a few days ago what my reluctance about the article is: I don’t think that science is what’s beautiful; it’s what science reveals to us about the natural world that is delightful and appealing. There is nothing in the realm of human accomplishment that can inspire awe in me like certain sunsets, the sight of a red cardinal at the birdfeeder, a Hubble Telescope image of a distant galaxy, the delicacy of a flower blossom, the breeze-induced sway of a large oak tree, the sight of Appalachian Mountain ridges receding into the hazy distance, and the graceful flight of a hawk.

Yes, human art can lift us up and thrill our senses, but it doesn’t hold a candle in my mind to the wonders of nature. For those who live in urban areas, it’s easy to become overly focused on the human species’ accomplishments in the various fields of art. I believe one can cure that bias by traveling to the country, lying back on the ground on a clear night, and gazing into the sky, or becoming mesmerized by the stunning colors of a sunset.

Is Beauty Truth?—Part 2

I believe that the previous posting describes Stewart’s restrictive use of the word beauty. And how about his use of truth? The meaning of truth is where philosophers can really wax endlessly. But let’s narrow the field (according to Stewart) by considering truth to mean physical reality. The main aim of the physicist is to discover nature’s story, to seek nature’s truth. While the mathematician plays with abstract (not necessarily real) concepts, a physicist plays with nature’s rules and behavior—looking to discover the reality of how the world works. Nature holds the truth and the physicist is attempting to uncover her secrets.

When beauty and truth are described this way, I think I see the crux of Stewart’s argument, because as it turns out, the mathematician’s beauty has often been the same as nature’s truth. Time and again physicists, struggling to grasp a given physical reality, have come upon a rule or law (not their law, but nature’s) that previously was neatly expressed by a mathematician who was completely unconcerned with the physical world. The mathematician may have thought the rule was her theoretical and beautiful insight, but nature was already operating that way. Beauty becomes truth.

Another way to view this situation is to note that nature consistently prefers elegance. Time and again physicists have discovered that Mother Nature takes the simple path. When physicists are bumbling about and, say, are positing two different theories of how things might work, they’ve often gotten closer to reality by choosing the simpler one. I’ve written before of how Kepler’s three elegant laws of planetary motion (expressed by three simple—and beautiful—mathematical equations) came to be seen as having far more truth than Ptolemy’s contorted and confusing model of how the planets were supposed to move.

Ian Stewart’s main point is that symmetry can demonstrate to us the equivalence of mathematical beauty and physical truth. I won’t try to describe his definition of symmetry—it’s a little too esoteric for me to try and tackle here. In a general way, however, when something possesses symmetry, we find it has a pleasing quality—for it helps our mind to more easily and fluently grasp it. Symmetry literally helps to smooth our mental processing. Symmetrical things, it turns out, not only appear to us as true, but it’s also pretty much the way that nature works: being both symmetrical and true.

So nature—by definition “The Truth”—is at root beautiful. A giant of pure mathematics and physics, Paul Dirac, once put it, “A physical law must possess mathematical beauty.” Ian Stewart wraps up his book Why Beauty is Truth with, “In physics, beauty does not automatically ensure truth, but it helps. In mathematics, beauty must be true—because anything false is ugly.”

Over the last 2-3 decades I’ve been privileged to become increasingly absorbed in local nature, as I’ve watched the flora and fauna surrounding me. In the process I have come to consider nature as something to be revered. The local creatures and plants have been teaching me their truths as they have been showing me their beauty. The more I learn, the more I can comprehend that the story of nature, at root, is elegant. The totality of it, however, is beyond mere human comprehension. I am in awe of it; I’m overwhelmed by its beauty. Is that not something divine?

Is Beauty Truth?—Part 1

For a couple of centuries scientists, mathematicians, and philosophers have argued about the validity of the last two lines of John Keats Ode on a Grecian Urn: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all/ Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” Keats seems to be equating truth and beauty in these lines, and there are many who agree with him. However, there is an equally adamant group of folks who take issue with Keats and find all sorts of reasons why beauty and truth are not the same, or at least that one does not necessarily imply the other.

As often happens when parties disagree, they frequently are using different definitions, and there are few words that have more contradictory interpretations than beauty and truth. Beauty certainly is a relative term—one person’s beauty is another’s ugly. Truth, although it infers an absolute state, can at best be only partially fathomed by us humans. Truth, if we pursue it unwaveringly, may slowly reveal itself, but we can never fully own it. So the arguments persist. If people can’t even agree on whether something is true or not, or whether it’s beautiful or not, how do they ever expect to settle the dispute of whether or not they are equivalent?

I recently read a book by the eminent British mathematician and prolific writer Ian Stewart, that unequivocally takes a stand on the issue. Stewart titled his book Why Beauty is Truth. It’s really “a history of symmetry” (that’s the subtitle of his book), but along the way he builds a pretty strong case for why “beauty must be true,” but he does so in a rather narrow definition of each term.

One of my frustrations in reading the book (besides having my brain become numb by all the pure mathematics he goes into) is that Stewart never clearly defines what he means by either beauty or truth. He seems to assume that anyone brash enough to tackle his book will already know what truth and beauty are, as he uses them. He’s kind of like the musician who delves into a detailed lecture on timbre and counterpoint rhythms, assured that everyone is familiar with those words.

The book was still rewarding for me to tough out, though. Afterwards I kept pondering what beauty and truth are, as Stewart uses them. Here’s what I came up with, thanks one more time to wonderful Internet resources. (I really appreciate Wikipedia!)

Stewart—being a mathematician—is primarily concerned with mathematical beauty. Pure mathematicians love to refer to a mathematical concept or proof as beautiful, and when they do they usually mean that it is elegant, in the sense of being (1) clean, with a minimum of details, (2) succinct, and/or (3) original and unexpected (as in a discovery of some fundamental mathematical relationship). In other words, it must be simple, straightforward, unique, and balanced.

When a mathematician plays with theoretical concepts in algebra, geometry, and number theory, and eventually comes upon a pure, simple insight, he literally gets a feeling of aesthetic pleasure and considers it beautiful. The Babylonian and Greek mathematicians fell in love with the beauty they found (particularly Pythagoras’s geometrical discoveries).

Next time, truth…