Beauty In Art And Science

This is a little segment from a documentary about Nobel price winning physicist, Richard Feynman in which they discuss the notion of beauty in arts and sciences. To me, beauty seems to be the most important and most elusive universal concept. The greatest motivating force, the thing that captures our interests and as we chase it we discover newer and newer parts of the world around or inside us, which otherwise we would not have bothered to do. The thing that is beyond basic instincts to survive, and yet it can become more important than those. To admire it makes our lives worth living. And yet... there are many ways one appreciates beauty, some seem mutually exclusive, as one listens to this conversation. We could also say that while Feynman discusses the beauty in details, an analytic approach, his artist friend rather appreciates the whole. Anybody who ever did some science can appreciate what Feynman says about the beauty in details, and how those details fit together. And yet I also feel that science often fails to see that the imminent, spontaneous beauty of things do not survive if they are taken apart, as perhaps some artists cannot see beauty beyond their own scope of perception. So perhaps the questions raised could be put as follows, for the scientist "What does the knowledge of the details add to the whole if the whole is destroyed in the process?", and to the artisit "How can you say you know beauty, if you know nothing about the intricate details that make it possible?". I think the important thing to realize is we always have a choice what view we take for a specific occasion (or experiment with more than one even if they seem exclusive...). I mean it seems unlikely that even scientists would run havoc mutilating all flowers on a field of roses, or cutting up breasts for that matter, for the merits of details, for example... A scientific training is not a lifelong obligation to analyze, nor is an artist only capable of seeing only one dimension of beauty, despite the fact that people who exclusively insist on being one or the other (perhaps the majority, unfortunately) give you that feeling...