Joyeful One of a Kind Friday: Beauty in Physics

First of all, I want to announce that there is a winner in the Gussy Sews Giveaway! Allison of Pieces of Me has won my print, “Smiling Faces”

Congratulations Allison! And many thanks to all the wonderful comments I received about my paintings on the Gussy Sews site!
Todays’ Joyeful Find is another book: “The Strangest Man” by Graham Farmelo. In one of my numerous podcast moments of listening to Scientific American, I heard Mr. Farmelo interviewed. Being interested in creativity and beauty, and having an amateur interest in quantum mechanics( always trying to read books on this fascinating subject attempting to figure out what it all means!!), I was drawn to this book. It is a biography of Paul Dirac, one of the, if not the foremost, physicist of the 20th century. Apparently he was am extremely quiet man, probably due to his dysfunctional childhood. People saw him as strange and socially paid him little mind. However, he was obviously a genius, being the scientist to discover, through mathematical formulas!, the existence of anti matter. In 1933 Mr. Dirac was one of the youngest theoretical physicists to win the Nobel Prize.

What really interests me in this man is his admiration of beauty. He looked for the elegance in his formulas and as said in the The Strangest Man website: “Dirac’s eyes glazed over during talk of the practical and philosophical consequences of quantum physics: he was concerned only with the search for the fundamental laws that describe the longest strands in the universe’s fabric. Convinced that these laws must be mathematically beautiful, he once – uncharacteristically – hazarded the unverifiable conjecture that ‘God is a mathematician of a very high order.’” It seemed that he was only satisfied with a complicated mathematical formula if it was truly beautiful and rejected some because they were ‘ugly’.
Beauty can be found in many things, as can the ability to be creative. Elegance is beautiful, I am sure Mr. Dirac would have agreed.

Read more Joyeful Friday Finds: Music of Hope.

Joye’s July artwork for sale can be found at Gallery Shop.