The reality in which we live is full of beauty and wonder, but there is much more beauty and wonder if one knows enough science to appreciate many aspects of that beauty. Knowing science, we can better appreciate the many ways that something might be different than it is. We can better appreciate what is beautiful in its simplicity and what is beautiful in its complexity.
When I was a senior at Brown University working on my senior thesis on metals with defect structures in them, I had a discussion with a nice and very intelligent particle physicist who had taught me the introductory physics course for physics majors. Half the freshmen physics majors were no longer physics majors by the time that course was over, but it was not because the professor was a poor teacher. He was demanding. Now when I told him about my project though, he was appalled and said that I was doing dirty engineering. He told me that the beauty of physics was in simplicity. I adamantly argued back that while simplicity was indeed often beautiful, so was complexity. Complexity in materials allowed us to tune materials in many ways to get the properties we wanted for many purposes. It was beautiful in that it made materials much more individualistic and gave us as molders of their properties much more power. Of course this complexity could tax our brains, but was it not wonderful to be so challenged? Wasn't there beauty in something that required us to be the most we could be mentally? He was not convinced.
Years later, the work of physicists on amorphous materials came to be widely recognized as important physics, including a Nobel Prize award, and I hoped that my old professor had taken note of this. Still later, there was a great deal of excitement in chaos theory and it was recognized that even relatively simple systems could behave in very complex ways. Again, I wondered if my professor had taken note.
About seven years ago, I and a friend who is also a materials physicist, had a discussion about space and time. It turns out that we each had already arrived at the conclusion that space and time were not likely continuous as assumed. We each thought that there were units of space volume and of time that were discrete in keeping with discrete packets of energy and matter in physics. It is interesting to note that the director of the Fermilab Particle Astrophysics Center near Batavia, Illinois thinks this may be the case now also. He is conducting experiments on the noise that would arise as a result to test this hypothesis now. Physics itself and the universe it describes is just wonderfully complex and amazing because of this.
I have had an interest in the science of climate and the hypothesis that man-made emissions of infra-red absorbing and emitting gases such as carbon dioxide might have catastrophic effects on the climate for many years now. The Earth's climate is wonderfully and beautifully complex. It's understanding is in no way settled science, despite the many ridiculous claims that it is. As with so many other manifestations of science and physics, we have many very essential and basic questions to answer yet. We actually know little about how additions of carbon dioxide will affect the climate. I have argued that there is good reason to believe the effect is much smaller than many alarmists would have us believe. This is not to say that the effects of carbon dioxide are unimportant, but that part emitted by man is not nearly as important as has been claimed by many. The dominant effects upon climate are very much those of nature alone. This at least is my prediction based on my understanding of the essential physics. But, I am very sure we will be able to watch many really beautiful insights into the climate develop as we continue to pursue our understanding of the physics of the climate.
We see many instances of beautiful physics in the materials we analyze in our laboratory for our clients. These materials can be amazingly complex as we unravel their compositions and properties. It is a most beautiful job to be a scientist earning a living by investigating the properties and wonders of materials. We get to work on many of tens of thousands of types of materials processed in tens of thousands of ways and used for thousands of applications in tens of thousands of environments. There is wonderful beauty in these materials and challenge after challenge in learning to appreciate it.
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