ONETRUTH & BEAUTY
Aesthetics in life and in the cosmos
Since antiquity, the subjects of truth and beauty have occupied the thoughts of our deepest thinkers—especially the minds of philosophers and theologians and the occasional poet such as John Keats, who observes within his 1819 poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn”:1
Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
What might these subjects look like to visiting aliens who have crossed the Galaxy to visit us? They will have none of our biases. None of our preferences. None of our preconceived notions. They would offer a fresh look at what we value as humans. They might even notice that the very concept of truth on Earth is fraught with conflicting ideologies, in desperate need of scientific objectivity.
Endowed by methods and tools of inquiry refined over the centuries, scientists may be the exclusive discoverers of what is objectively true in the universe. Objective truths apply to all people, places, and things, as well as all animals, vegetables, and minerals. Some of these truths apply across all of space and time. They are true even when you don’t believe in them.
Objective truths don’t come from any seated authority, nor from any single research paper. The press, in an attempt to break a story, may mislead the public’s awareness of how science works by headlining a just-published scientific paper as the truth, perhaps also touting the academic pedigrees of the authors. When drawn from the frontier of thought, the truth still churns. Research can wander until experiments converge in one direction or another—or in no direction, a warning flag of no phenomenon at all. These crucial checks and balances commonly take years, which hardly ever counts as “breaking news.”
Objective truths, established by repeated experiments that give consistent results, are not later found to be false. No need to revisit the question of whether Earth is round; whether the Sun is hot; whether humans and chimps share more than 98 percent identical DNA; or whether the air we breathe is 78 percent nitrogen. The era of “modern physics,” born with the quantum revolution of the early twentieth century and the relativity revolution of around the same time, did not discard Newton’s laws of motion and gravity. Instead, it described deeper realities of nature, made visible by ever-greater methods and tools of inquiry. Like a matryoshka nesting doll, modern physics enclosed classical physics within these larger truths. The only times science cannot assure objective truths is on the pre-consensus frontier of research. The only era in which science could not assure objective truths was before the seventeenth century, back when our senses—inadequate and biased—were the only tools at our disposal to inform us of the natural world. Objective truths exist independent of that five-sense perception of reality. With proper tools, they can be verified by anybody, at any time, and at any place.
Objective truths of science are not founded in belief systems. They are not established by the authority of leaders or the power of persuasion. Nor are they learned from repetition or gleaned from magical thinking. To deny objective truths is to be scientifically illiterate, not to be ideologically principled.
After all that, you’d think only one definition for truth should exist in this world, but no. At least two other kinds prevail that drive some of the most beautiful and the most violent expressions of human conduct. Personal truths have the power to command your mind, body, and soul, but are not evidence-based. Personal truths are what you’re sure is true, even if you can’t—especially if you can’t—prove it. Some of these ideas derive from what you want to be true. Others take shape from charismatic leaders or sacred doctrines, either ancient or contemporary. For some, especially in monotheistic traditions, God and Truth are synonymous. The Christian Bible says so:2
Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.
Personal truths are what you may hold dear but have no real way of convincing others who disagree, except by heated argument, coercion, or force. These are the foundations of most people’s opinions and are normally harmless when kept to yourself or argued over a beer. Is Jesus your savior? Did Muhammad serve as God’s last prophet on Earth? Should the government support poor people? Are current immigration laws too tight or too loose? Is Beyoncé your Queen? In the Star Trek universe, which captain are you? Kirk or Picard—or Janeway?
Differences in opinion enrich the diversity of a nation, and ought to be cherished and respected in any free society, provided everyone remains free to disagree with one another and, most importantly, everyone remains open to rational arguments that could change your mind. Sadly, the conduct of many in social media has devolved to the opposite of this. Their recipe: find an opinion they disagree with and unleash waves of anger and outrage because your views do not agree with theirs. Social, political, or legislative attempts to require that everybody agree with your personal truths are ultimately dictatorships.
Among wine aficionados, there’s the Latin expression, “In vino veritas,” which translates to “In wine there is truth.” Audacious for a beverage that contains 12 to 14 percent ethanol, a molecule that disrupts brain function and (irrelevantly) happens to be common in interstellar space. The epigram nonetheless implies that a group of people drinking wine will find themselves, unprompted, being calmly truthful with one another. Maybe that happens at some level with other alcoholic beverages. Even so, vanishingly few of us have ever seen a bar fight break out between two people drinking wine. Gin, maybe. Whisky, definitely. Chardonnay, no. Imagine the absurdity of such a line in a movie script: “I’m going to kick your ass, but only after I’m done sipping my Merlot!” The same incredulous claim can probably be said of marijuana. Smoking dens don’t tend to be the places where fights break out. Supportive evidence, if cinematically anecdotal, that honest truth can breed understanding and reconciliation. Maybe that’s because honesty is better than dishonesty, and truths are more beautiful than untruths.
Far beyond wine truths, and close cousins of personal truths, are political truths. These thoughts and ideas already resonate with your feelings but become unassailable truths from incessant repetition by forces of media that would have you believe them—a fundamental feature of propaganda. Such belief systems almost always insinuate or explicitly declare that who you are, or what you do, or how you do it, is superior to those you want to subjugate or conquer. It’s no secret that people will give their lives, or take the lives of others, in support of what they believe. Often the less actual evidence that exists in support of an ideology, the more likely a person is willing to die for the cause. Aryan Germans of the 1930s weren’t born thinking they were the master race to all other people in the world. They had to be indoctrinated. And they were. By an efficient, lubricated political machine. By 1939 and the start of World War II, millions were ready to die for it—and did.
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The aesthetics of what is beautiful and desired in culture typically shifts from season to season, year to year, and from generation to generation, especially regarding fashion, art, architecture, and the human body. Based on the size of the cosmetics industry and the larger beauty industrial complex, visiting space aliens would surely think that we think we are ugly beyond repair, in persistent need of “improvements.” We’ve designed household tools to straighten curly hair and to curl straight hair. We invented methods to replace missing hair and to remove unwanted hair. We use chemical dyes to darken light hair and to lighten dark hair. We don’t tolerate acne or skin blemishes of any kind. We wear shoes that make us taller and perfumes that make us smell better. We use makeup to accentuate the good and suppress the bad elements of our appearance. In the end, there’s not much real or chromosomal about our appearance. The beauty we’ve created is not even skin-deep. It washes off in the shower.
That which is objectively true or honestly authentic—especially on Earth or in the heavens—tends to possess a beauty of its own that transcends time, place, and culture. Sunsets remain mesmerizing, even though you get one every day. Beautiful as they are, we also know all about the thermonuclear energy sources in the Sun’s core. We know about the tortuous journey of its photons as they climb out of the Sun. We know of their swift journey across space, until they refract through Earth’s atmosphere, en route to my eye’s retina. The brain then processes and “sees” the image of a sunset. These added facts—these scientific truths—have the power to deepen whatever meaning we may otherwise ascribe to nature’s beauty.
Hardly any of us have ever grown tired of waterfalls or the full Moon ascending over a mountainous or urban horizon. We persistently fall speechless at the singular spectacle that is a total solar eclipse. Who can turn away from the crescent Moon and Venus, together, suspended in the twilight skies? Islam couldn’t. That juxtaposition of a “star” with the crescent Moon remains a sacred symbol of the faith. Vincent van Gogh couldn’t turn away either. On June 21, 1889,3 he captured it from the pre-dawn skies in Saint-Rémy, France, creating what is perhaps his best-known painting, The Starry Night. And we never seem to get enough landscape panoramas from planetary rovers or cosmic imagery delivered courtesy of the Hubble Space Telescope and other portals to the cosmos. The truths of nature are rampant with beauty and wonder, out to the largest of measures of space and time.
It’s therefore no surprise that the God or gods we worship tend to occupy high places, if not the sky itself. Or we perceive high places as closer to God—from mountaintops to puffy clouds to the heavens. Noah’s ark settled atop Mount Ararat, not on the edge of a lake or river. Moses didn’t receive the Ten Commandments in a valley or on the plains. They came to him atop Mount Sinai. Mount Zion and the Mount of Olives are holy places in the Middle East, as is the Mount of Beatitudes, the likely location of Jesus’s famous Sermon on the Mount.4 Mount Olympus was a high place above the clouds, crowded with Greek gods. Not only that, altars tend to be built in high, not low, places, with Aztec human sacrifices, for example, typically held atop Mesoamerican pyramids.5
How often have we seen posters, or even fine art, depicting cherubs, angels, saints, or a bearded God himself floating on a cumulonimbus cloud—the greatest of them all. Cloud taxonomy fascinated the Scottish meteorologist Ralph Abercromby, and in 1896 he documented as many as he could around the world, creating a numerical sequence for them. You guessed it. Cumulonimbus clouds landed at number 9, unwittingly seeding the everlasting concept of being on “cloud nine” when in a blissful state.6 Combine cloud nine with beams of sunlight reaching every corner of an image, and you can’t help but think of divine beauty.
Animist religions, common to indigenous peoples around the world from Alaska to Australia, instead tend to assert that nature itself—the brook, the trees, the wind, the rain, and the mountains—is imbued with a kind of spirit energy. If ancient peoples had had access to the cosmic imagery of today, their deities might have enjoyed even more places of beauty to hang out in while looking over Earth. One nebula (PSR B1509–58), imaged by NASA’s orbiting Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) in x-ray light, resembles a huge glowing hand in space with a clearly visible wrist, palm, outstretched thumb, and fingers. Even though the nebula is the glowing remains of a dead, exploded star, that didn’t stop people from dubbing it “The Hand of God.”
Alongside their catalog IDs,7 we typically name astrophysical nebulae for what they resemble, using all kinds of fun earthly references, including the Cat’s Eye Nebula (NGC 6543), the Crab Nebula (NGC 1952), the Dumbbell Nebula (NGC 6853), the Eagle Nebula (NGC 6611), the Helix Nebula (NGC 7293), the Horsehead Nebula (IC 434), the Lagoon Nebula (NGC 6523), the Lemon Slice Nebula (IC 3568), the North American Nebula (NGC 7000), the Owl Nebula (NGC 3587), the Ring Nebula (NGC 6720), and the Tarantula Nebula (NGC 2070). Yes, they all actually look like or strongly evoke what we’ve called them. One more: the Pacman Nebula (NGC 281), named for the hungry 1980s video game character.
Splendor doesn’t end there. In our own Solar System, we’ve got comets and planets and asteroids and moons, each revealing a stunning uniqueness of shape and form. For many of these objects, we’ve amassed intimate, objectively true knowledge of what they’re made of, where they’ve come from, and where they’re going. All while they rotate and move along their appointed paths through the vacuum of space, like pirouetting dancers in a cosmic ballet, choreographed by the forces of gravity.
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In the White House of the 1990s, Bill Clinton kept on his Oval Office coffee table, between the two facing couches, a sample Moon rock brought back to Earth from a quarter-million miles away by Apollo astronauts. He told me that any time an argument was about to break out between geopolitical adversaries or recalcitrant members of Congress, he would point to the rock and remind people it came from the Moon.8 This gesture often recalibrated the conversation, serving as a reminder that cosmic perspectives can force you to take pause and reflect on the meaning of life, and on the value of peace that sustains it.
A form of beauty unto itself.
But nature does not limit its beauty to things. Objectively true ideas can carry a beauty all their own. Allow me to choose some favorite examples:
One of the simplest equations in all of science is also the most profound: Einstein’s equivalence of energy (E) and mass (m): E = mc2. The small c stands for the speed of light—a constant that shows up in countless places as we unravel the cosmic codes that run the universe. Among a zillion other places that it shows up, this little equation underpins how all stars in the universe have generated energy since the beginning of time.
Equally simple, and no less profound, is Isaac Newton’s second law of motion, which prescribes precisely how fast an object will accelerate (a) when you apply a force (F) to it: F = ma. The m stands for the mass of the object being pushed. This little equation, and Einstein’s later extension of it from his Theory of Relativity, underpins all motion there ever was or will be for all objects in the universe.
Physics can be beautiful.
You’ve probably heard of pi—a number between 3 and 4 that harbors infinite decimal places, although often truncated to 3.14. Here’s pi with enough digits to see all ten numerals 0 through 9:
3.14159265358979323846264338327950 …
You get pi simply by dividing the circumference of a circle by its diameter. That same ratio prevails no matter the size of the circle. The very existence of pi is a profound truth of Euclidean geometry, celebrated each year by all card-carrying geeks of the world on March 14—a date that can be written as 3.14.
Math can be beautiful.
Oxygen promotes combustion. Hydrogen is an explosive gas. Combine the two and get water (H2O), a liquid that douses fires. Chlorine is a poisonous, caustic gas. Sodium is a metal, soft enough to cut with a butter knife and light enough to float on water. But don’t try that at home because it reacts explosively in water. Combine the two and get sodium chloride (NaCl), more commonly known as table salt.
Chemistry can be beautiful.
Earth harbors at least 8.7 million species9 of plants and animals, most of which are insects. This staggering diversity of life sprang forth from single-celled organisms four billion years ago. In this very moment a harmonic intersection of Earth’s land, sea, and air supports every one of them. We are all in this together. One genetic family on spaceship Earth.
Biology can be beautiful.
What then of all that is true but ugly in the world? Earth is commonly thought to be a haven for life—nurtured by the maternal instincts of Mother Nature. That’s true to an extent. Earth has been teeming with life ever since it could support life. Yet Earth is also a giant killing machine. More than 99 percent of all species that ever lived are now extinct10 from forces such as regional and global climate change as well as environmental assaults such as volcanoes, hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, tsunamis, disease, and infestations. The universe is also a killing machine, responsible for asteroid and comet impacts, the most famous of which struck Earth sixty-six million years ago, rendering all the famous oversized dinosaurs extinct, as well as 70 percent of all other land and marine species of life on Earth. No land animal larger than a duffel bag survived.
What’s true but hard to admit is our morbid fascination with massive geologic catastrophes as well as destructive weather systems. They’re all things of beauty—perhaps even an entire category unto itself: something to behold and admire, but only from a safe distance, although some people ignore the safe distance rule. How else do you breed “storm chasers” and death-wish meteorologists who report live from the docks while catastrophic storms batter the shoreline, drenching themselves and whoever was volunteered to hold the video camera that day.
A volcano is stunning at any angle. The red-hot fluid oozing from its caldera and down its slopes via tributaries and rivers is composed of liquefied rocks. At room temperature, these are things we sit on, build homes upon, and use as metaphor for all that is stable in the world. The volcano built itself with liquefied rocks, in that spot, on its own schedule, serving as a portal to Earth’s literal underworld.
And is there anything more beautiful than a 300-mile- wide hurricane, viewed from on high or from space, slowly rotating like the gaseous pinwheel of storm clouds it is? How about a vigorous thunderstorm, with frequent, loud, and scary cloud-to-cloud and ground-to-cloud11 lightning strikes?
And even though an asteroid took out Earth’s big-toothed, badass dinosaurs, their absence pried open an ecological niche that allowed our tiny mammalian ancestors to evolve into something more ambitious than hors d’oeuvres for T. rex. That’s undeniably a beautiful thing—at least for the branch on the tree of life that became primates, to which we belong.
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Cosmic impacts can be destructive and deadly no matter where they occur. When sky-watchers Caroline and Eugene Shoemaker, along with David Levy, discovered comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 (one of many comets that bear their names), astro-geeks of the world all fought for a look through their telescope eyepieces. Why? After discovery, the comet’s orbit was quickly determined to be on a collision course with the planet Jupiter. The world’s astrophysicists mobilized our largest and most powerful telescopes, Hubble included. Previously scheduled observing slots were willingly forfeited. We even deputized Galileo, a Jupiter-destined space probe, not yet arrived, to join the observations. In a previous visit, Jupiter’s strong tidal forces had ripped the comet apart, creating a parade of smaller chunks that maintained orbit. On July 16, 1994, we witnessed the first of nearly two dozen impacts—fragments A through W—on Jupiter. The biggest of these, fragment G, collided with the energy of six teratons (six million megatons) of TNT, equivalent to six hundred times the world’s arsenal of nuclear weapons. These impacts left visible scars in Jupiter’s atmosphere larger than Earth itself.
And it was beautiful.
A cosmic perspective cloaks the up-close damage and mayhem caused by these catastrophes. Their beauty subsumes all that is destructive. All that is lethal. Nothing died on Jupiter that day. Had those comet fragments collided with Earth, it would have been an extinction-level event.
Copyright © 2022 by Neil deGrasse Tyson
