Today's scientific experiments are complex, and countless researchers perform statistical analysis of large amounts of data, which makes scientific research contain collective wisdom. In terms of public understanding of science, early traditional scientific experiments were more concise and easy to demonstrate. But scientific experiments, then and now, have aesthetic value, not only in visual perception, but also in understanding of the world.
Written by | Milena Ivanova (Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge)
Compile the | Terracotta
People always habitually think that the beauty and elegance of scientific theories are important, while ignoring the exquisite design of the apparatus in experimental research, the beauty in experimental design also deserves our attention.
In order to understand and change the world around them, people create science, including theories, models, and experiments, and they often receive words of praise, such as pleasant, or beautiful.
From Einstein's theory of relativity and Darwin's theory of evolution to scientific experiments such as the discovery of electrons, DNA replication, and white light dispersion, scientific discoveries are not only praised for revealing the truth of the world, but also for the process of scientific discovery because they are so beautiful, concise, and exquisite.
Just as people praise artists for their imagination and talent to create new things, people praise the aesthetic value of science while not forgetting to praise scientists and praise them for their creative talent as artists. There are also attractive artistic spaces in experimental science, but they are often overlooked. As we shall see below, scientific experiments can be appreciated as art, and they can become public landscapes along with works of art, evoking our aesthetic experience.
Aesthetics in famous scientific experiments
Going back to the origins of experimental science, experimental science has been labeled as art when natural philosophers in the 17th century demonstrated scientific experiments in public. Experimental science, as a act of revealing or interfering with nature, is documented in the literature dating back to the 1620 publication of Novum Organum, in which author Francis Bacon highlights the important contribution of experimentation in forming hypotheses about the world and in verifying their correctness.
Experiment became the core of the empirical approach to scientific research, and with the help of new experimental instruments, coupled with constant experimentation and repetition, natural philosophers were able to explore areas that had not been touched for a long time, turning the unknown of the world into the known. During this period, scholars used the newly invented air pump to study vacuum; Newton used prisms to decompose natural light; and advances in optics and lenses promoted the development of new instruments, allowing scientists to go further down the road of research. For a time, these experiments became the key to understanding new inventions and the new discoveries that resulted from them.
Joseph Wright's Experiments with Birds in the Air Pump, 1768
Joseph Wright's famous painting An experiment on a bird with The Air Pump brilliantly depicts the performance artistic qualities of the experiment itself and the rich forms in which the experiment evokes the audience's aesthetic response. In the middle of the painting is an experimental operator, but more like a performer. He's not just showing the audience the experiment itself, he's also playing a role in controlling the atmosphere of the scene, provoking emotions in the audience, triggering a sense of awe, or making people feel like it's entertainment. When the air in the cylinder is slowly sucked away by the air pump, the unfortunate bird is dying, and the audience's rich expression is vividly painted, with confusion, awe, joy, and fear brought about by this mystery. The British chemist Joseph Priestley has made it clear that these experiences go beyond the very starting point of showing the phenomenon to the public. In his notes, he recorded the reactions of everyone after the current experiment, and in his description, "this is the most pleasant sight", giving the audience a sense of awe, excitement, and pleasure.
One of the most important aspects of these scientific experiments is their demonstrative nature, and the audience can immediately see the results of the experiments and feel the changes. Taking the air pump experiment as an example, the audience can intuitively see the results of the reduction of gas under the action of the air pump, which is similar to the appreciation of theatrical performance, which can bring the audience intuitive feeling and appreciation. It is worth noting that the aesthetic value of scientific experiments in this era is easy to appreciate, that is, experiments have characteristics that can bring visual pleasure, such as the prism in Newton's hand, bringing people a beautiful rainbow. But are these characteristics unique to traditional experiments, and can modern experiments be appreciated as well?
Aesthetics in modern scientific experiments
Although scientific experiments have changed dramatically over the centuries, there is still no shortage of great experiments in history that are still memorable even today, as exemplified by the Pitch Drop experiment, which is probably the longest experiment in history. The design of the bitumen drip is Thomas Parnell from the Department of Physics at the University of Queensland, who placed the asphalt in a transparent glass funnel to show the properties of highly viscous fluids, and what appears to be solid bitumen is actually a fluid. Experiments that began in 1927 and continue to the present day, with a total of nine drops, the most recent being in April 2014, and the 10th drop is expected to occur sometime in the 2020s. The design of this experiment contains many characteristics of the early experiments, such as the simplicity of the experimental device, the visual pleasure, and the convenience of being placed in public, and the content it wants to express is easy to be displayed, so it is easy to arouse public enthusiasm and increase participation, while appreciating the elegance of its design.
Asphalt drip experiments at the University of Queensland, in order to prove the viscosity of asphalt
If the asphalt drip experiment still has many shadows of the early experiments of the Royal Society, it is far from today's scientific experiments. Today, experimental devices seem more and more complex, and it is not as easy as it used to be for the public. Some large experimental devices, such as cern's Large Hadron Collider, are extremely complex devices, the product of thousands of scientists working together, and the experiments it conducts transcend national boundaries, requiring a lot of long-term complex calculations to obtain an experimental result.
Compared with modern scientific experiments, early science was very simple and could immediately observe the results of the experiment; for example, the vacuum pump experiment, people can immediately see the effect of vacuum. But modern scientific experiments lack this immediacy feature, and experiments on the Large Hadron Collider, whose measurements first need to go through a process of statistical analysis before scientists can publish conclusions about whether certain "matter" has been detected, just as the discovery of the Higgs boson also went through a lengthy process of analysis and reconsideration.
So, can it be said that modern experimentation does not have any pleasant points from an aesthetic point of view? On the contrary, even if these experiments are too complex and the process of obtaining them is a little slow, they can still bring people visual beauty. At the Nuclear Research Center in Europe, people can feel its scale and the complexity of the working process up close as a visitor, and at the same time, during the visit, they also realize that such a super-large-scale design is not only achievable by individual strength, but also contains the wisdom and cooperation of many people, on the surface it is a device, but in fact it encapsulates the creativity of a group.
The importance of beauty
We evaluate the beauty of experiments can be diverse, they can be the creative thinking behind the experimental design, can be the rationality of the experimental process design, can be the elegance and beauty of the experimental results. The results of the experiment itself can be very beautiful, such as the rainbow behind the prism, the crystal under the microscope. Of course, the experimental device and the experimental process itself can also contain elements of beauty, and the beauty in the experiment requires a pair of eyes with aesthetic ability.
When an experiment enters the public eye and becomes the object of attention, people will want to know more about the purpose of the experiment and how to achieve this goal after being attracted by the charm of the experiment itself.
So, the superficial visual inspiration draws us to the experiment, to participate in the experiment, and then to discover a deeper beauty, which can come from a deep understanding of the experimental design or the meaning of the experiment, thereby increasing the understanding of the world. I think it is the interplay between experimental design and meaning that makes the aesthetic value of experimentation. However, don't overlook that the initial visual perception of the experiment plays a very important role in stimulating people to pay attention and participate in the experiment.
bibliography
[1] Pitch Drop experiment - School of Mathematics and Physics - University of Queensland (uq.edu.au)
This article is translated from Milena Ivanova, The Beauty of Experiments Matters
Original link: https://iai.tv/articles/the-beauty-of-experiments-matters-auid-2038
Special mention
1. Enter the "Boutique Column" at the bottom menu of the "Return to Simplicity" WeChat public account to view the series of popular science articles on different topics.
2. "Return to Park" provides the function of retrieving articles on a monthly basis. Follow the official account, reply to the four-digit year + month, such as "1903", you can get the index of articles in March 2019, and so on.
Copyright note: Individuals are welcome to forward, any form of media or institutions without authorization, may not be reproduced and excerpted. Please contact the background within the "Return to Pu" WeChat public account for reprint authorization.