Beauty: Symmetry

“Beauty is bound up with symmetry.” ~Whewell

The beginning musings of a post…

Considering the mathematical nature behind proportion and pattern and our evolutionary propensity towards these processes – perhaps beauty exists in a formula.  Richard Feyman states, “You can recognize truth by its beauty and simplicity.”   Whewell most famously stated, “My work always tried to unite the true with the beautiful; but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful.”  Mrs. Heisenberg writes of her husband, “…He talked about the miracle of symmetry as the original archetype of creation, about harmony, about the beauty of simplicity, and its inner truth.”  In letters to his sister, Heisenberg goes on to say of the interrelationships in atomic theory, “Not even Plato could have believed them to be so beautiful.  For these interrelationships cannot be invented; they have been there since the creation of the world.”

Is our certainty of a given truth the result of our own efforts, a confirmed discovery, and therefore pleasing [beautiful]?  With truth, we can find language to comprehend it.  Beauty leaves the impression of a gift, independent of intellect and conquest.  Language is not always available to communicate beauty.  Technique cannot hide a lack of inspiration – just as much as educating or analyzing cannot always result in revealing beauty where we did not see it before.  This does not presuppose beauty and truth cannot coexist or in fact inform one another, as is often the case in science, in nature, and specifically in architecture.

Some question symmetry as nature’s fallback and not a source of organization – that when not enough information is available to complete a system, symmetry is substituted in at that point of weakness.