Beauty Health Unit – work for your wonderful life

There are many definitions of beauty for they mean different things to different people. If you have a leaning towards the visual arts, your view of ‘beauty’ might be a sunset, a mountain, a woman’s face, a vintage car, a sleek yacht or an old man’s face. Looking with different eyes, beauty might be found in the abstract equations of pure mathematics, the crystal structure of D.N.A. or the bizarre world of elementary particles.

The Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Fynman said many truths in his time on a variety of subjects, and not all to do with physics. Once in an in depth interview for the B.B.C. in 1965 he was asked about beauty. His answer was to recount the arguments he had with a close artist friend about the beauty of a flower. The artist would enter a discourse on the aesthetics of a flower, its texture, the composition the flower made with its surrounding etc.

Fynman retorted that this was really only a very superficial view of the flower and one that science could improve on. He maintained that there was a ‘hidden’ beauty born of knowledge present within the flower. Expounding this idea, he went on to describe how the cells the flower was made of had beauty in their different shapes and structures; and there was even beauty in the myriad chemical reactions going on that kept the flower functioning.

Feyman’s interview started people questioning their values on beauty, as well as fostering a deep interest in science in the young(myself included).

We now know that what may be termed ‘beautiful’ could be an object that is patterned or textured, an image of symmetry or asymmetry, or a celebration of perfection or imperfection. Beauty seems to be so wide in its definitions it cannot be pinned down. It is just so subjective ; and is, as they say, ‘in the mind of the beholder’.

One answer as to what beauty might be lies in the workings of the human mind itself. Our concept of beauty appears to be a construct of imagination. It seems evident that the mind invents, alters and contrasts what it perceives, to make sense of it. In other words, the mind attempts a construct of reality; and since we are all individuals, each produces a slightly different picture.

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