![]() Such accounts, however, come predominantly from Nobel Prize winners and celebrity scientists, leaving open the question of whether scientists more generally experience science aesthetically. The picture we get from these accounts is of science as a profoundly emotional, passionate, and aesthetic endeavor, in which symmetry and elegance are often used as heuristics for truth (Dirac 1980 Gell-Mann 2007). Among the public, scientists are often seen as socially dysfunctional, middle-aged, myopic white males in lab coats, busy with tedious experimentation (Kahle 1993 Long and Steinke 1996).īy contrast, writings of scientists in recent decades have emphasized the aesthetic dimensions of science, and the role of beauty, awe, and wonder in scientific inquiry (e.g., Chandrashekhar 1987 Dirac 1963 Dawkins 1998 Feynman 2005 Wilczek 2016). Today, science is seen as a rational, methodical, analytical, and objective endeavor (e.g., Reiss and Sprenger 2014), while the aesthetic sphere is characterized by emotion, subjectivity, irrationality and even a resistance to rationalization (Gane 2002, 111). The scientific sphere, in particular, was seen as opposed not simply to religion but also to aesthetics. Max Weber (1958) famously characterized modernity as entailing a fragmentation of the social order into distinct, autonomous, and conflicting value-spheres. ![]() □ The PDF of the article gives specific page numbers. ![]() “The Beauty of Understanding: Scientific Understanding as Aesthetic Experience.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 12 (3): 27–35.
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