Brandon Vaidyanathan, The Diversity of Beauty in Science (Diving Deeper, September 2024)
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Diving Deeper is a monthly series of Zoom discussions for ASA members and their friends to think more deeply about an article or book review published in the ASA journal, Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith. https://network.asa3.org/page/DivingD...
This month's discussion featured Brandon Vaidyanathan (Associate Professor of Sociology, The Catholic University of America) on his plenary talk given at this year's annual meeting at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC.
Scientists, traditionally viewed as paragons of rationality, have been critiqued since the Romantic era for reducing and stripping away beauty and mystery from nature. Yet, recent Nobel laureates and renowned scientists have portrayed science as a source of beauty and awe, akin to art. What does beauty mean to scientists and how does it shape the practice of science?
To explore this topic empirically, we conducted the first global study on the role of aesthetics in science, surveying nearly 3,500 physicists and biologists across the US, UK, Italy, and India and conducting more than 200 in-depth interviews with them. We identified three main types of beauty in science.
Sensory beauty in nature draws many to become scientists yet differs across scientific fields.
Useful beauty is the reliance on beauty as a guide to truth, which is a subject of considerable debate among scientists.
The beauty of understanding—the joy of uncovering the hidden order underlying phenomena or inner logic of systems—is the most valued aesthetic dimension of science.
Our research suggests that science is fundamentally a quest for the beauty of understanding, which unites the rich variety of aesthetic aspects of science. In our divided times, we have much to learn from scientists about how to value and cultivate this kind of beauty in our lives.
Brandon Vaidyanathan is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Sociology and Director of the Institutional Flourishing Lab at The Catholic University of America. He holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Business Administration from St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia and HEC Montreal respectively, and a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Notre Dame. Brandon's research examines human flourishing in religious, commercial, and scientific institutions, and has been widely published in peer-reviewed journals. He is author of Mercenaries and Missionaries: Capitalism and Catholicism in the Global South (Cornell University Press, 2019) and co-author of Secularity and Science: What Scientists Around the World Really Think About Religion (Oxford University Press, 2019). His research has been funded by grants from the John Templeton Foundation, Templeton Religion Trust, and the Lilly Endowment. He is also Founder of Beauty at Work, a media platform which includes a podcast and YouTube channel that aims to expand our understanding of beauty: what it is, how it works, and why it matters for the work we do. He is currently working on a book co-authored with Bridget Ritz, titled The Beauty of Understanding: What Scientists Can Teach Us About the Pleasures of Learning.
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