The Meaning and Value of Beauty in Science (Opening plenary, International Symposium on Beauty at Work) Part 1 of 2

What does Beauty mean to scientists? Why does it matter for the practice of science?

These questions drive the opening plenary session of the Beauty at Work international symposium held at The Catholic University of America, May 26, 2023.

We’re going to share this session with you over the next couple of episodes.

The session opened with remarks from the President of the Catholic University of America, Dr. Peter Kilpatrick. It was followed by a discussion between four scientists: Dr. Robert Gilbert (Professor of Biochemistry, University of Oxford); Dr. Aaron Dominguez (Professor of Physics and Provost, Catholic University of America); and Dr. Massimo Robberto (Space Telescope Science Institute) and Dr. Maria Teresa Landi (National Cancer Institute at NIH) who moderated the conversation.

There are some beautiful visuals and videos that you can watch on our YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IG_ESu8RPeI

This symposium was sponsored by Templeton Religion Trust, the Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies at the University of Southern California, the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture at the University of Notre Dame, the Archbridge Institute, and the Institute for Human Ecology at the Catholic University of America.

Transcript

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SPEAKER_03 0:04

What does beauty mean in science and why does it matter to scientists? These questions drove the opening plenary session of the International Symposium on Beauty at Work that we held in Washington, D.C. in May 2023. We're going to share this discussion with you over the next couple of podcast episodes. In this first episode, we're going to hear opening remarks from Dr. Peter Kilpatrick, President of the Catholic University of America, and then we're going to hear a discussion between four scientists. Dr. Robert Gilbert, Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Oxford, Dr. Aaron Dominguez, Professor of Physics and Provost of the Catholic University of America, Dr. Massimo Roberto of the Space Telescope Science Institute, and Dr. Maria Terisalandi of the National Cancer Institute at NIH, who moderated the conversation. There's some beautiful visuals and videos that you can also watch on our YouTube channel, which is in the link in the show notes. The symposium was sponsored by Templeton Religion Trust, the Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies at the University of Southern California, the De Nicolas Center for Ethics and Culture at the University of Notre Dame, the Archbridge Institute, and the Institute for Human Ecology at the Catholic University of America. We now start with President Kilpatrick's remarks.

SPEAKER_01 1:11

Thank you, Brandon. I want to add my welcome to everyone here at the symposium. It sounds like an exciting interdisciplinary venture. And I shared with Brandon that I've actually lectured on beauty in science. So I thought I would just share a few reflections, just what I've learned about beauty in my own investigation. So we we typically characterize persons or created things as beautiful, as being awesome or majestic, wonderful, mysterious, full of splendor, thrilling, or humbling. A dictionary definition of beauty is a pleasing quality associated with harmony of form or color, excellence of craftsmanship, truthfulness, originality, or other often unspecifiable property. Aquinas asserted that beauty has three key elements, which he called integritas, consonancia, and claritas. Integritas is the Latin word which roughly translates one or whole. So something about beauty must be whole or integral. Consonancia roughly translates as agreement or concord, and is equivalent in some respects to harmony, symmetry, and proportion. And claritas roughly translates as brightness, clarity, or radiance. So one can point to many aspects of classical and man-made beauty in which a premium is placed on symmetry, harmony, proportion, and much has been written about this. Much classical art, classical architecture, natural forms revolve around the elegance of proportion. For example, implicit in the golden rectangle or the irrational number phi or the Fibonacci sequence. In nature, symmetry and proportion are so commonplace that an entire field of both mathematics and science has arisen around this called group theory. Many of the most important discoveries in science have occurred because of the existence of symmetry, simplicity, elegance, and even supersymmetry as one descends to the smallest of size scales and the most primitive of bits of matter, quarks, leptons, and the like. Murray Gelman, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, who arguably did the most to invent the standard model of subatomic particle physics, famously wrote in 1969 that, quote, one thing that makes the adventure of working in our field particularly rewarding, especially in attempting to improve the theory, is that a chief criterion for the selection of a correct scientific hypothesis seems to be the criterion of beauty and simplicity, or equivalently elegance. And yet there is important strangeness or uniqueness about the elegance and simplicity of the laws of physics. For example, the universe is unexplainably two-dimensional and low entropy. The physical constants that define the ways the laws of physics unfold appear to be so finely tuned that our own universe appears to be designed with specific ends in mind. Theorists posit that the only way this can be is that there must be an infinity of universes, and we must be in that very finely tuned one that allows for sentient life to exist. All of this points to the uniqueness and particularity of our own created world. And this, I would assert, is the other critically important dimension of beauty, namely uniqueness, mystery, or what Aquinas called claritas, or what the social political philosopher Jacques Maritin calls radiance or radiant form. One explanation for this is that all life, all matter, is a one-of-a-kind individual incarnation of matter because of the infinite variety of ways in which matter can be constructed. A theist would assert that this uniqueness is a result of all instantiations of matter flowing from the mind of a creator who values each individual creation as the providential beneficiary of God's immense overflowing love and creativity. Thank you for the opportunity to share these thoughts with you and best wishes for a successful symposium.

SPEAKER_03 6:39

Thank you, President Kitpatrick. I now want to introduce our moderator for this evening's panel on beauty in science and why it matters. Dr. Maria Teresa Landi received her MD Summa Camlade from the University of Milan and was trained in oncology and general medicine at the San Rafaele Hospital in Milan. She received her PhD in occupational medicine and industrial hygiene. And then in 2006, she received tenure in the National Cancer Institute's Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics. And in 2021, she was appointed senior advisor for genomic epidemiology in their transdivisional research program. Her research focuses on understanding tumor etiology and evolution for potential translational applications. She leads large-scale multidisciplinary research projects primarily on genetic and environmental determinants of lung cancer and melanoma. Dr. Landi, thank you for joining us and for moderating this evening's panel. And panelists, you can take the stage.

SPEAKER_06 7:56

I have a little bio. So Professor Robert Gilbert has been tutor in biochemistry and a fellow at Magdalen College in Oxford since 2002. He has been professor of biophysics in the Nashville Department of Medicine at Oxford since 2015 and director of the Medical Sciences Graduate School at Oxford since 2017. Notably, he was ordained a priest in the Church of England in 2011 and served as an associate priest in four parishes in Oxford and currently in Hendriton Quarry, the Church of C.S. Lewis in New York. Rob is also the author of Science and the Fruitfulness of Beauty from 2017. And his own academic specialty is in structural biology and its application to an improved understanding of information on flow in the cell, cell signaling and virology. Second, Dr. Aaron Boningetz is the provost and ordinary professor of physics here at the Catholic University of America. His main area of research is in using particle colliders to search for new physics, including the recently discovered Higgs boson. His area of expertise is in instrumentation, designing, building, and using silicon charged particle trackers as precision tools to reconstruct the complicated interactions taking place in this collision. He received his undergraduate degrees from Whitman College and Caltech, and his PhD in physics from UC San Diego, and was a postoral doctor researcher at Lawrence Barclay National Laboratory. In 2005, he was the recipient of the NNS Career Award, and he has played numerous leadership positions in particle physics experiments at the SURM laboratory in Switzerland and a Fermi Lab in Chicago. As the provost, Dr. Dominguez is the chief academic officer of the university and oversees the academic life of Catholic universities through twelve schools, its libraries, research, institutes, and the Catholic University of America press. He aims to change the course of students' lives and propel them toward a meaningful, I would say, beautiful future. And then we have the last but not least, Dr. Massimo Roberto, is an officer or observatory scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, where he leads a team of astrophysicists assigned to NIRCAM, the main instrument of the James Webb Space Telescope, very well known now. He's also a research scientist at the Center for Astrophysics of the Johns Hopkins University. He studied at the University of Turin in Italy, where he obtained a Sumacum Lagde degree in physics and a PhD in astronomy. In his career, he worked as a research astronomer at the Astrophysical Observatory of Turin and as a staff astronomer at Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Eidelberg, before being selected by the European Space Agency to work on the Hubble Space Telescope in Baltimore. His main research field is star and planet formation. He has led multiple large Hubble programs, including two treasury programs of the Orion Nebula cluster that have produced some of the most beautiful images ever made by the Hubble telescope. And very important, he also has an asteroid with this name. Asteroid Roberto is one kilometer rock orbiting at 270 million miles from the sun. So welcome the three speakers here. So to begin the conversation, um I would like to ask each one of you to describe an experience of beauty that you had in your scientific research. So a moment in which studying something or a discovery, you say, ah, that's beautiful. And tell us why. If you have some, I I know some of you have slides, right? Okay, so um what is that here? Yes.

SPEAKER_04 12:40

This is my slide. And uh and it's a slide which uh is both contemporary and historical. So on the bottom right, you can see the molecule EDTA, which chemists will be very familiar with and biochemists. And EDTA is a molecule which binds divalent cations. It's something you learn about in your final years at school. It's something I learned about in my final year or two at school. And I thought at the time, when I was 17 or 18, I thought how beautiful. I thought, how wonderful that we can have a sense of the way in which this organic molecule encases this divalent, this metal cation, and the ways in which it's curled around and its shape is suited to engaging with that cation and bonding with it electrostatically. So that was quite an early experience, and it's in fact one of the kinds of uh formational experiences which drove me towards reading biochemistry at university and becoming a research biochemist and a structural biologist. And thinking back to what I what I saw of beauty in that is to do with the form of the thing, and it's also to do with the way that the form tells me something about how it works. So there's this shapeliness to the interaction, they are well suited to each other, this this positively charged metal ion and this organic molecule that's encasing it. And there's a beautiful shape that I thought it formed. Indeed, I went home and I made myself a model. I had a model in kit, I made myself a model of this molecule because I thought it was beautiful when I studied it at school. So that's reaching back to when I was 17 or 18. And the other, the main image on the screen is actually from a paper that I submitted last night. And and this is from our current some of our current work, and this to me is very beautiful. And if I was to say why there's beauty in these images, I would point, first of all, to a kind of beauty that I think you hopefully would all be able to agree with me as well, and my 17 or 18-year-old staff would be able to see as well, which is that there is a formliness to it. Up the middle there, you have this yellow ribbon of a piece of RNA, which has a very specific fold. This is actually a microRNA or pre-microRNA. It's a piece of RNA which is involved in uh master regulating cell fate. And in fact, if this microRNA doesn't get matured into a mature microRNA that will engage in what is called RNA interference as a master switch in sulfate, then someone will be more susceptible to cancer. It's a very important tumor suppressor molecule, this yellow piece of RNA. But you can see it has a certain form to it, it has a double helical structure, as double-stranded pieces of RNA and DNA do. So there's a certain river-like helical shapeliness to it, and a beauty, I think, which is perhaps um discernible whether you're a specialist or not. And then behind it, there's a protein molecule to which it is suited, it's fitted. So just like the EDTA molecule is well suited to finding to binding a positively charged metal ion, this protein here is well suited to binding this piece of RNA. And the untutored mine can see a sort of form uh and a suit, a suitability of these two structures to each other, which is satisfying. But for me as a biochemist, I see that. But what I also see is that I can delve in more closely and understand that fittingness uh in very precise detail. And so I've just got a small window at the top right there showing how the piece of RNA in yellow is interacting with the protein in a very precise way, and that helps us to understand uh how this recognition is going on and what are the precise atomic recognition events between particular pieces of the RNA and pieces of pieces of the protein that are bringing about this binding. All of this is very subjective, and this subjectivity is a lot of what gives scientists like me pleasure, and it's a lot of what actually drives a lot of us to do what we do. In fact, probably all of us to do what we do when we do structural biology, we delight in what it shows us of how the world works. And my colleagues will talk incessantly about the beauty of their results, and they will they will cry out in a satisfied way where they see the elegance, the fit, the simplicity, the ways in which you get an answer, the clarity that you obtain by seeing how one thing fits another. But what is remarkable for me is that not only is there is what I think is a beauty there, that fittingness, that form, that coherence that you see as one molecule engages with another, but there's also uh um from that subject fiddle and from that subjective engagement and that pleasure, there's a capacity to really understand in detail how something is working. And in this case, potentially in the future to do something about the cancers that happen when this RNA gets uh mistreated by this protein, gets modified in a way that leads to dysregulation of sulfate and the causing of a whole range of cancers this RNA is a master switch against. And that kind of insight is shown on the top right, that detailed chemical insight. And that for me is one of the most striking things about the beauty scientists feel in my field. There's something subjective and pleasurable about the engagement we have with what we study, and that is frankly why we do it, because we find it beautiful. But the fact is that subjectivity gives us objective understanding, and that objective understanding in the right hands helps us design drugs that stop people dying. And there's nothing at all subjective about that. I suspect I'm gonna have time to talk a little bit more about that point in a few minutes, but I just want to make that point now that here you have a way in which the subjective leads into the objective precisely because of the way which we engage with the beauty of something and value it for itself.

SPEAKER_06 18:13

So, in in a way, the the beginning, I want to go into the beginning of your description when you spoke about the form and that you know struck you from the beginning, from when you were 17. And you are a structural biologist. So, would you say that in your field, as a structural biologist, so form is one of the major features, you know, absolutely linked to beauty.

SPEAKER_04 18:37

So, what we're seeking is is a three-dimensional description of the chemistry of biological molecules. So we're looking at the form of the chemistry, the three-dimensional space in which the chemistry happens. And as it happens, it is the case that that three-dimensional chemistry is carried out by protein molecules and things like nucleic acids like DNA and RNA, which everybody now knows about because of vaccines. Yes. So, um, so the point is that uh DNA and RNA, proteins, whatever, these pro these molecules interact with each other in a shape in a way which is which has a form, a very defined shape. Right. And that shape is built on the chemistry of those molecules and it tells us how they work. But there's a real delight in seeing the engagement, the other to it, to yes, in the same way, it's I don't think it's very different, frankly, to the way in which a child is pleased that a Lego brick fits in another Lego brick or the way in which a block fits in a shape of the right kind if they're a very small child.

SPEAKER_02 19:37

Right.

SPEAKER_04 19:38

I think there's the same kind of satisfaction, just as adults were playing with kind of rather more sophisticated things, and we're discovering that the world is fitted to itself, just like we can fit things to themselves as children when we play.

SPEAKER_06 19:52

Yeah, thank you. Aaron, what do you think? Can I proceed with your yes?

SPEAKER_00 19:57

I've got a couple of slides here. So this is an image, it's a composite photograph of uh the experiment that my collaborators and I built in Geneva, Switzerland, called the compact muon solenoid. And you can't really tell from the scale of the photograph because there's not a person in there, but it's huge. It's uh it's as large as like a five-story building. Um, so it would fit like, you know, not quite fit in the basilica right across the street. It's huge. It's a gigantic thing. It's buried underground, 150 meters underground in France, just across the border from Switzerland. And uh and the the large hadron colliders uh beampipe goes right through the very heart of this detector. And I wanted to show this image, and then what comes next is um the output of this experiment, a visual representative of what we see. But just the the detector itself, I think, is beautiful. I I think there's um there's beauty in the way that we've designed it. And um and it comes from you you see natural symmetries in the way that we've built the experiment, right? You see, you see uh patterns, you see kind of a harmony of uh uh of pieces that we've put together, and we've we've designed it with a specific purpose in mind, which is to study what happens when these particle beams collide. And knowing in advance uh the kind of physics that we've already discovered over the past hundred or so years, we saw like in the video that that uh that Brandon showed, you know, Maxwell's equations, that helps that helps actually us uh to build to design this in in the right way that to to allow us to see uh the results of these particle collisions. And so you see built into our our human design machine the this the built in symmetries of the universe, right? The built in beauty of of the universe that we're responding to uh with a machine. machine um in order to s to better study the the beauty of the uh of this universe so I yeah let's go to the next slide so here's um here's the results of one of these collisions uh of the proton beams so the proton beams are accelerated to pretty close to the speed of light uh about 14 trillion electron volts of energy and uh these bunches of protons collide 40 million times a second in the middle of that detector that you saw on the previous on the previous slide uh and create a little miniature nuclear explosion with the average energies present in that collision um were the were about the average energies present in the early universe a trillionth of a second after the inception of the universe a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang we reproduce the uh the types of energies and and uh interactions that were taking place in the very earliest stages of the universe so what what we try to do as particle physicists is understand what are these basic building blocks of nature what are the rules for putting them together how does how does it all work and um this image here if there's a timestamp which I hadn't looked at until uh I had already sent it but it's it's May 27th 2012 at nearly midnight uh Greenwich mean time and in that year July 4th of 2012 we announced the discovery of the Higgs boson and this is uh one of the events that we took um that's consistent with um with one of the decay channels of this Higgs boson decaying into a pair of Z bosons one decaying into a uh a muon and an anti-muon pair which you see as the red the red traces and then an electron and positron pair you see as the as the green towers on on either side uh the uh of the uh of the experiment and then in the middle you see kind of this little fireball of quarks coming out from the remnants of the the proton collisions and this is so this is a visual image that uh representing the you know all the ones and zeros and and things that we measure that come out of that extremely complicated machine on on the previous slide and put into a a visual form that we can recognize we can see what's going on and show it to people who aren't you know who aren't scientists once we explain kind of the the legend of of what what's uh you know what's inside of this picture but there's a beauty to it which I think is obvious to anybody you can see you see something there i mean you can you can make sense of different parts of what's happening in the form of this explosion it's not chaos uh but quantum mechanics is is a is a random it's a it's a part of the universe that's random in a sense we don't know exactly what's gonna happen in that particular uh collision we could just predict the probability of of what will happen but it's we don't know what's gonna happen we can't we can't force the this collision to produce a Higgs boson we just have to design the experiment and run it long enough to produce enough of them to get enough pictures like this to build up a statistical profile of the Higgs boson. But for me seeing these types of um the result of that means when I see that up there it means my detector works uh which is like the least trivial thing that the that you could possibly say and uh because it mostly doesn't work and and it takes years to to design to design design these things and operate them and that you know so that timestamp up there tells me somebody was on shift at midnight in the control room taking this data. So we we run this thing when it's running it's a 24 hour operation it's always manned. So they're not down there uh you know with the beams you would you would die from the radiation but they're in the control room operating the experiment. So we're able to do this kind of work only because of uh you know the the friendship of of our fellow scientists cooperating together peacefully in this joint pursuit of something that's much much bigger than us and I find that to be a very beautiful aspect of the kind of science that we do it's not it's not a solo endeavor. We really do rely on uh our friends uh to be able to do this so it's through friendship that we've been able to discover this the beauty of God in a sense which we could not have otherwise been able to do um and you know on the on July 4th 2012 when we announced the discovery of the Higgs boson the the CERN auditorium which is this big auditorium was packed full of all the scientists and we had first uh you know we've had first hour spokesperson present our results that showed we've we have uh you know uh very high confidence level uh that we've discovered this new Higgs boson in these uh in these various channels and uh and then after the next the next hour the speaker for the our competing experiment so we have two big experiments where we don't we're competing like two football teams we don't share we don't share share each other's secrets uh we both have kind of the same rules um and then we use it as a way to cross check each other and also to I think to that competition encourages excellence in a way um and but it it gives you the ability to cross check each other's results so if you both if if if you both have something that's consistent um that gives you a pretty good feeling that what you've discovered is probably correct. If one is right if one has a uh you know a result that's not consistent something something's not quite right and that allows us to to try to figure out what the truth might actually be. And so we when when I saw Fabiola Cinotti our competing spokesperson's result that was consistent with ours like this wave just went through the whole crowd and people were crying you know this we discovered the Higgs boson we've done something that started in 1967 and took us all those years of work like it wasn't through lack of trying that it took us those those 50 years uh to do this uh and and we did it and we were right there together so that that was like now you can't repeat this I probably wouldn't ever be able to repeat such a an experience in my life right but to have been to have been there and to be part of that and to know that um that's how we did it I think that's another form of beauty uh for me.

SPEAKER_06 28:54

Just to as a curiosity how many people more or less worked on something like this like are we talking about thousands.

SPEAKER_00 29:01

It's thousands. It's like teams of 3,000 each plus all the technicians and all of the staff and all of the support people and they come from literally everywhere. When you're down in the in that cavern with this gigantic detector you hear practically all the languages I mean the the operating language of the physicist is English the operating language of all the technicians and engineers is French but then everybody else is speaking Italian you've got Russians got Bulgarians Polish pipe fitters it's just this like and we're all down here in this cramped space with safety equipment on um it's just yeah it's like a science fiction movie but it's real it's fantastic.

SPEAKER_05 29:46

Okay Massimo can I proceed with the slide you have slides right yeah so let's uh I uh I picked up a movie to show sort of a path here in the it's it's a very it's a few seconds but uh the uh the idea is uh to start from something that uh looks pleasing to the eye in some ways more uh art form we I would say which is a beautiful image taken with the Hubble this was taken one of the first ones taken once we replaced we put the last instrument with the last uh shuttle service emission and we had for the first time a camera that was able to work for the ultraviolet to the near infrared so broadband observations and multiple the stars appear with all the colors and they are all messed up and and and the image is actually beautiful. But then there is uh here a little transformation just moving them around you see that order happens. So there is there is a secret way to look at the image which is the way that reveals a more profound level of uh order is the right word or cosmos which is the Greek word for order. And this is where I think the second level of beauty happens. What really attracts us is the fact that we uh reality hits us with something pleasing to the eyes etc but then we are able to understand better that under that first aspect there is uh there is a uh an order is the is the right word so there is a logos um you know an archae in a logos at the beginning is is this order which is the real texture of nature that we try to uh to find to understand and each time we find it uh we say that's beautiful no there is uh this is it's at that level that really we resonate which is and is amazing as is that the other slide that we can understand it that's that because then we really are part of that logos with our brain and this is where things get really interesting. So let's see if we can start the movie I don't know if uh from there no that's it's not this one that's the previous one go back go back okay here and there is a little here I don't know if the person at the uh no maybe someone has to do it from here yeah there's a little audio as well I don't know if we can hear it but you can read the text. So this is a globular cluster which is one of the oldest objects we have around our galaxies there are about 150 of them and they are like 13 billion years old 12 billion years so not far from the origin of time and uh uh this is a public space telescope image of the crowded core of the globular cluster Omega Centauri.

SPEAKER_02 32:44

The brilliant colors of the stars are real. They correspond to stellar temperatures they can also be used to trace stellar evolution. Astronomers like to know how blue the blue stars are and how red the red stars are so we'll first sort these stars out by color blue on the left and red on the right next we'll sort the stars according to brightness the brightest stars at the top and the faint stars at the bottom the final plot you see represents different stages of evolution of stars. Stars spend most of their lifetime burning on the main sequence. When the fuel starts to run out they expand to become red giants they find a new source of fuel, helium and burn blue hot but even that runs out. They end up burning out as white dwarfs.

SPEAKER_05 33:38

Based on images for the Hubble Space Telescope we've assembled a true plot that is a snapshot of the life history of stars in this ancient cluster it's like the next level you see something and we see this all the time the images that we take with the Hubble, with Webb, etc, they are really pleasing, colorful, spectacular and you see symmetry, you see but then what is interesting is that we can dig in and find out what is behind that. And this is the way nature works and this is the point where where beauty resonates with the ultimate structure of reality which is a cosmos and is a cosmos we can understand. And the next slide basically shows this type of path because it's amazing that this type of plot that one comes from a science paper is sort of the same stuff. But no with the a couple of cartoons you put the physics together you put the equations and then we can reproduce exactly that type of plot starting with the with the math that we have invented so we can we can that the this order is uh is is uh uh can be understood we we do this all the time there is a there is a nature there you must you must look at nature in the right way you must reorganize things and then uh our brain our reason understand it and this is an interesting uh point I think for me of nature which is of of beauty which is to to understand this type of deeper level of truth that the reality offers us so it's beyond the aesthetic the aesthetic level it's really something that we are part of the same reality of the same cosmos because we are we are dust stellar dust basically and we are able to understand how how things are made how we are made and ask the next question why know where we come from why why why is this way? And this is where I find for me the most uh profound and most uh uh spectacular uh level of of beauty in reality