Thinking quickly, there are three moments I experience beauty in my work: doing fieldwork, analysing my data, and interacting with local communities and students. 

I feel privileged of working on the ecosystem I research, not only due to its socio-environmental importance but also because in the field it is very easy to see and feel the beauty of science. By seeing beauty, I mean seeing organisms I have never imagined I would be able to see alive and in the wild – this includes plants, animals, fungi, etc. By feeling beauty, I mean being able to look around and realise that through science we can propose and test explanations to understand how ecosystems work, as well as see (and feel) things that are hard to put into words why we consider it beautiful – it can be from a leaf with cool spiky structures to learn “reading” the direction the rain is coming from by the sound of the water touching the leaves in the forest far away from you. 

I know it can sound very nerdy, but I also find beauty and satisfaction in analysing my data. This is because in the field we experience science in an intense and multidimensional way, we also think about the hypothesis we are testing, and we even sometimes observe patterns that make us curious about what the analysis will show. I find beauty in trying to translate what the data is saying through models and figures to address scientific questions. There is also some satisfaction with the idea of data analysis being part of the cycle of scientific work. 

I also find beauty in interacting with local communities and students. The first group, because many times I realised that what I was trying to test (or build scientific evidence on), as a scientist, was already observed by local people who live and/or depend on forests. Silly, but meaningful, examples include trying to understand how human activities are affecting biodiversity and listening to field assistants explaining why and how they would expect me to not found some specific organisms in specific places based on the needs of that species from their traditional knowledge. I see beauty in the fact that even coming from so different contexts and having so many different opportunities, many local community members are also naturalists and get excited to discuss science in their own words. I also find beauty in interacting with students because I see our role as scientists as a bridge between the present and the future – this could be seen both through the science and technologies we can produce, but also through providing support to future generations. We were in their place one day when others invested in us to become scientists and now it is our time to give back. 

Definitely I would say so. I think that even if people don’t realize it, the thing that drives most scientists to do what they do is seeing it as beautiful – like you could get paid, or whatever, [seek] reputation. But to sit down for hours and actually do the work, I feel like you have to be able to see something in that – something that’s attractive to you. And I think that I would call that beauty. I don’t know, people might disagree, but I would call what people see in it that draws them into it, beauty.

[I experience beauty ] In the way things that fit together. So I read a really good book recently called Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and it was not what I was expecting it to be, but it was very philosophical and he talked about ideas of quality and beauty and you have the idea of romantic beauty and classical beauty, or ‘quality’ rather is what he called it. And he gave this really good analogy I liked, of your awareness is like a desert and everything that you could possibly be aware of is all the sand in the desert. But you’re only really aware of a handful of sand at a time ’cause there’s so much coming in, there’s so many things you could be seeing, smelling, thinking in your subconscious- it’s just all the desert. but you’re only really focusing on a handful of sand. And then some people can just look at that handful of sand and think, wow, that’s really cool, that’s really beautiful, just in its own right. But then other people could dissect the pile of sand and sort it out into different sizes, different opacities, different colors and they see a lot of attraction in that sorting process. And it’s the same thing they’re looking at, the same pile of sand, but they’re just looking at it in very different ways, and so I think there’s a difference in the sort of you see in science and the sort of you see in, I don’t know, art or whatever, but I think there’s still like a relationship between the two.

For a specific example, I think when you’ve spent a long really long time working on something, so for the past few years I did software development and I worked with a big team and we built like a massive project, and there’s so many moving parts that fit together very delicately. And it’s very precisely balanced, and if any one thing isn’t working, the whole thing falls down, and I think that balancing act and working on that and seeing and understanding every little part of it in order to continue working on it, I think that’s what I would describe as beauty. Because when you’ve got something working, I don’t know, you’ve been searching for a bug for ages and you find it and then suddenly everything is working. You just sit back and watch it and just, like wow, that’s really cool. 

[What I was doing then] was engineering, so that’s another topic: what’s the difference between science and engineering. It’s building something from ideas that have already been had before. People already had the ideas of computer science and whatever, and I was just taking those and building something new that was relevant to what we were doing, and whereas people downstairs in the lab, I’d say what they were doing was science, like it was a quantum computing, so we were building a quantum computer. The experimenters that stand in the lab, they were doing things that had never been done before, and like building a physical quantum computer and doing lots of experiments every day, just gathering data and finding the best ways to fit things together. Whereas we weren’t finding anything new. We were taking already established ideas and just putting them together in a way that would make their job easier and also allow other people to use our quantum computer. What I do now is that I’ve started a PhD in Quantum Technologies and what I’m hoping to do is what I would call science and I think, again, it might be slightly different, the way I see the two is one’s like discovering new things, one’s building something. And again, I think building something, again, is beautiful, but also discovering something new, that is also really beautiful in its own right.

[It’s like] the difference between staring at a landscape and just appreciating it for what it is: It’s just natural and this is the universe we live in. This is the landscape, this is the tree, this is the leaf, this is the flower – or someone who’s painted a picture and spent a lot of time putting something into that, and I think, the difference being, one’s just the universe, and it’s just raw and the other one is very cultural, there’s a lot of context to it, like when you’re building a bridge, there’s a lot of context and this is to connect two places together to get people across. We need to do that for, I don’t know, whatever reason, convenience. 

I think the other element of it is you have to have an understanding. And I think that’s where the context – because some people can find a landscape beautiful and other people not – like some people can look at the city and think it’s really cool and I’m OK about that. And I think it’s like it comes entirely from where you come from and different people see different types of beauty and different things. You can also share the same thing, so it’s also very personal, but at the same time very reliant on what you’re looking at and when it comes to science, it takes so much background knowledge and context for you to understand why what you’re looking at is beautiful. But you get that in art as well, like modern art is very – some people look at it and go “well what’s the point of that, you know it’s kind of stupid”, but there’s a lot of history and context behind what they’re doing. If you read about why they did what they did and when they did it and who they did it with, you can suddenly realize why what they did was significant, you know, and you’ve got to have that understanding in order to appreciate it.

Personally, when it comes to data, [I don’t experience beauty] so much. Like I would say I’m a theorist. When it comes to data, it’s something that I can do the manipulation of statistics, but the data itself, maybe not, and maybe that’s why I’m not an experimental physicist, whereas someone else might see that as beautiful and be more drawn to that, like as I say as well, so just because I don’t see it as such a way doesn’t mean it’s not beautiful for somebody else.

I really like teaching. I like explaining ideas to other people and I like having them explain to me and like having conversations about them. And that’s probably the best way to come to understand it better. You share those thoughts and ideas with other people and in only doing that, that’s the only way you can come to understand it better together. And maybe that’s why different people can see the same thing as beautiful, because we’re sharing knowledge of it in order to get a better understanding of it. And we can both appreciate it together.

As a pollinator ecologist I spend a lot of time in the summer out in the field observing pollinators, observing plants, thinking about flowers and so all of that is a very obvious beauty. And I think there’s that sort of beauty in detailed observation where you can just like look at a field of flowers and be like, oh, that’s a very beautiful thing. And then the closer you look, the more beauty there is, the more kind of fascinating little things there are to see and for me things like looking at a flower that’s maybe a really kind of bog standard, just like something you’d find on the edge of a road… You know a lot of people might look at it and think, oh it’s just a weed. And then you look at that close up and it has beautiful structures, amazing complex structures and it’s just there and we just don’t really notice it a lot of the time. And the other thing that I think is for me a source of beauty in my work is the idea of connection. That, I’m thinking about the connection between plants and insects. But then also there’s all the other connections that you know. It’s food webs, it’s all of these things being linked together in the kind of grander scheme of ecology. The way that humans are linked into those systems, the way that everything exists as part of an interconnected web, and to me that sense of connection is a really beautiful thing and is almost at times an almost religious or spiritual thing that everything being connected and dependent on each other. And that’s – yeah, I definitely feel that a lot when I’m when I’m doing my work.

I think that [research] can enhance [the experience of beauty] because when you gain understanding in a greater depth, then you see more beauty in it and it really struck me a while back I watched that documentary about fungi, “Fantastic Fungi” or something, that came out and people loved it and raved about it. And I watched it with a friend who is also a scientist – but is a physicist and we were talking about it afterwards. And one of the kind of things they talk about in that documentary is this idea of connection. Of all living things being collected connected through these fungal networks and mycelium and the way that is channels of communication between everything that’s living. And for me that was a very obvious concept, I felt like I knew that and that idea of all living things being connected, that’s my daily experience of what I do. For my friend, that was a moment of discovery, of “Oh my God, this is amazing, I hadn’t thought about this idea of everything being connected in this way”, and the joy and fascination in that. So I think that yeah, even because of me finding beauty in that particular thing and that sense of ecology and connectedness, that’s definitely enhanced by what I know and what I study and what I see. You don’t have to be a scientist to experience that, but I think that the discovery enhances it a lot.

I think sometimes with analysis there’s a beauty in maths and a beauty in numbers, and being able to describe things mathematically and can be incredibly satisfying. And I think there is a beauty in producing a really beautiful graph or a really beautiful figure, that I think is something that gives me a bit of a kick sometimes. And also something I really like about my particular discipline within ecology – a lot of it feels quite homemade, a lot of the time in terms of equipment that we use. A lot of ecologists if you’re out doing fieldwork, you’re not in a lab, you’re not using kind of state-of-the-art stuff. A lot of the time you’ll use pretty basic tools. You’re using stuff that’s quite homemade. You know there’s always something that’s been like duct-taped to something else to make it work. And I think that that that homemadeness of it, that actually everything is stuff that anyone could really use. I think that there’s something about that, there’s that kind of beauty in that of just being out there. And also stuff that’s quite old-fashioned, you know we still use the same equipment that was used by the Victorian explorers who went out and were discovering things for the first time and recording them. We’re still using the same stuff as them, I really like that.

I think that [beauty] is an innate part of science and discovery. And I think that knowledge is beautiful and understanding is beautiful, so anything that’s broadening your view of the universe and making you see things in a different way. There is a sense of beauty in that. I wish that more often we thought of our outputs in terms of beauty, because I don’t think we do and I think it can be very easy to get caught up in writing papers and getting data and it’s stuff that can end up a lot of the time these days it just ends up with something on a screen and you don’t really do anything with it. And if you look back again to, say, Victorian times in the way that Natural History and ecology was done back then, there was a lot of creativity, in that there’s a lot of artwork. It was producing beautiful paintings of ‘this is the thing that I’ve seen and discovered. These are illustrations of what I’ve observed.’ We don’t do that so much anymore and I kind of wish sometimes that we did because I think to make it, there are so many things where you’d be like here is a really beautiful representation of this knowledge, of this discovery. Yeah, so I think we should, we could do it more for sure.

I do and I think a lot of that comes down to why I went into science in the first place. So I think that anything can be beautiful because it’s about how it impacts on you, and how you experience it, and for me there is a beauty in solving something and finding a solution, finding everything fitting together neatly. And there’s also a beauty in chaos and not actually having a solution and things looking kind of weirdly disparate, yet all somehow working together.

I do sometimes and actually not always when it’s going well. Sometimes when it’s not going well it can be equally beautiful and I find myself yeah, I do find beauty in it. I find beauty in the images that my type of measurements that I do, the images that they create can be quite startling sometimes and I can find particularly when, you know that I get a result that’s maybe slightly unexpected or whatever, I can find myself going, “My God. That’s gorgeous”. Like that’s for you to look at the symmetry on that, isn’t that amazing. And actually I find myself – I have a colleague who shares images of the X-ray diffraction patterns that he’s taken going “Look how beautiful this is “and we do mean it as a kind of very – it is beautiful because we’re looking at a nanoscale and sub nanoscale structure. But we’re able to see, and kind of envisage what that must look like in real space and it’s gorgeous. You know, it’s actually genuinely quite movingly beautiful sometimes, so I think I do, yeah.

It’s [scientific] images themselves I think are actually genuinely lovely to look at, but I also think it’s definitely what they represent, my real fascination has always been the link between form and function. It’s this idea that the structure of something dictates what it does and that that’s ubiquitous across all length scales, and I think that that to me is incredibly beautiful, that looking at structure and just you can look at a structure of a bone, for example. And it’s beautiful to look at. But it also has a power to it because it’s it dictates what it does. So I can create images on their own that I think are objectively beautiful. But the fact that I can then translate those into something that means something more than just the image. I think there’s an inherent beauty in that as well.

[In equipment] it’s a strange kind of brutalist beauty. I’m a huge architecture nerd and I really like Brutalist architecture and I find going to for example, the diamond synchrotron. The stark concrete and the steel and the kind of just the sharpness of it. I walk in and I think this is like a cathedral, I get the same sort of feeling that people must get when they see, I don’t know, Neo Gothic architecture or something. I think this is just brilliant. There’s something quite visceral about it. In data: I think it’s about how the data are presented. I don’t derive a huge amount of beauty from a bit of Python code, although I imagine some people probably do. For me, yeah in equipment definitely. In data, maybe not so much so.

I don’t know [if it’s all the same kind of beauty experience] It’s my response to it. It’s how I respond to it and it’s the excitement and anticipation of seeing something that’s really attractive and really speaks to you. And I guess that’s the same whether it’s walking into an experimental hall and seeing all these incredible pieces of equipment or looking at something that’s an absolutely stunning symmetric scattering pattern, that I can’t believe that I’ve made. I think my response to them is probably the same, so they’re probably two sides of the same coin, really.

I think [experiences of beauty] have helped focus me in a way. I’ve always been fascinated by structure. Always. My parents will tell you I was constantly building things. I was always trying to work out how things were put together. I was the classic – I would take stuff apart and then try and rebuild it. The point where I really got it, was during my undergraduate degree was in my third year. I can remember the exact lecture that I was sat in. When the guy who went on to become my project supervisor actually, was telling us that the arrangement of atoms in the photosynthetic centres of plants were the same as the arrangements in single molecule magnets, and that you could learn about how to make a material by studying a naturally occurring phenomenon. And he just drew a cube of atoms up and said, you know, this relates to this, but this is the plant and this is what we make in the lab, and I’d never had somebody put it so starkly before that nature was an inspiration and I’d always written off anything that I that I perceived to be biological because I thought I didn’t understand it and somehow he was saying, “no, no, we can look at it on an atomic level and we can learn from it”, and suddenly I thought “Oh my God that’s incredible”, and that was to me, I remember saying “that’s the most beautiful thing anyone’s ever told me”. That there is this link, there’s this intrinsic link, at an atomic level between what a plant does and what we can make in the lab, and I had no idea that that existed and that to me was an absolute – I entirely switched what project I was doing on the basis of that and ended up going into that. Everything I do now is on the basis of that lecture, and he knows that and he hates me for it. We’re still in touch and he says “I can’t believe I said one thing and that’s changed your career” –  but it did! Because I saw something that I thought was inherently beautiful and I thought, right, that’s what I want to do, that’s. I found it. I’ve found the thing.

Then, I guess I’ve gone through some real dips in my motivation in my career. But I started collaborating with someone in Glasgow about 6-7 years ago and he brought me a load of structural issues that he was having with materials and asked me to help solve them, and I discovered a whole new method of doing it. And this is the kind of data that I now generate every day, which I love, and I find really beautiful to look at. And he’s the guy who I share things with – I’ll take a picture of something and say “Oh my God look at this. Look at the scattering pattern. How amazing, how gorgeous. How much does this tell us?” So I think it’s been an inspiration and a motivator at different points.

studying hasn’t changed my appreciation of beauty,] I think all it’s done is it’s given me another outlet. It’s giving me another way of looking – it’s giving me another appreciation of beauty. I sometimes find things to be very beautiful that that I think other people think I’m a bit mad or a bit kind of weird for. So particularly, you know when it comes to things like architecture and stuff, I tend to go for stuff like I love a big concrete building. I love them and I find actually, the inherent engineering behind that I find really beautiful and people say “but it’s just a block” and I’m like “but it isn’t it”. It’s so much more than that and so I think I’ve been able to appreciate I think maybe different types of beauty. Whereas for example an Impressionist painting which is held up to be, you know, by most museum standards you know these are beautiful things – kind of leaves me cold. I don’t really get it, but I also appreciate that other people do.

[Beauty is] a thread that weaves throughout [the scientific process] and I think it has to be, and I think sometimes you know the thread will be slightly more dominant, but I think it’s got to kind of be there to join it all together.

I guess there’s a pure aesthetic beauty in science in terms of like what you study, so I mean one of the nice things about working biology is you work with pretty things. Arabidopsis mutants look particularly pretty to me for example. Or flowering plants are fundamentally beautiful I guess. And then there’s, aesthetics aside, I think there’s a kind of elegance in science for me, that’s almost kind of equivalent to beauty in terms of the way you approach your subject. You know, if you set up a series of experiments and very carefully and innovatively address a question. There’s an intrinsic beauty to that, I would say. There’s also a beauty in just the kind of finding out the unknown, I mean that’s what science is. It’s asking about how the world around us works and I guess this fundamental interest in what’s out there and what we don’t know is kind of awe I guess in terms of another strand of beauty.

I made a beautiful scatter plot a couple of years ago and I thought, yeah, this looks really good. I’m really proud of the colour scheme and I just thought it looked very visually impressive for sure.I guess really the most beauty I feel is when you read about other people’s work. You’re quite familiar with your own work, but it’s when you might read a study by another group is working a similar problem and you see how they’ve come up with finding a solution, you know that’s really, that’s really neat. That’s really a beautiful approach to solving that question I guess in terms of reading other people’s work. What else do I do a day-to-day basis?

I’m trying to figure what’s the difference between beauty and just basic science where you ask a question because you want to find out the answer without any explicit translational benefits. You just say well let’s find out about the world. I think that is beauty, I think it’s just a different way of putting it. I mean basic science is the same way people looked at the stars and tried to measure the movement of the moon hundreds of years ago. That’s basic science and that’s just beauty put another way really. You might not put on a grant proposal “this is beautiful” you might put, “it’s of fundamental importance that we discover” But really, what you’re talking about, I think is more is kind of awe and wonder of the natural world and trying to understand it.

Certainly not always, but there are moments when you do things and you really just appreciate the beauty of it, I mean I work with a microscope as well sometimes. So obviously when you look down at any tissue it can be quite beautiful. And I’ve used GFP to mark cells to look at nucleus doing transformations and they’re just fascinating and intricately beautiful things to my mind.

Mine is not highly intellectual. Mine is an emotional rather than it’s an intellectual thing. I don’t think I’m particularly intellectual person, I’m even almost a little bit stupid, I’m not one of these high level scientists that’s really switched on to things. So I can be turned on by things that are quite simple really so I don’t know if I’ve got that intellectual concept of beauty. It’s a very sort of gut response to things – “oh I like that!”.

I obviously can get some ideas of beauty, but it’s not, it’s a slightly different emotion perhaps ’cause, I mean at the minute, perhaps we’re doing some work on genomes – and obviously the concept that you know a genome is this sort of strange multi dimensional thing out there. It can be quite fascinating and trying to bring that in and somehow represent that as a visual thing so people can actually explore that? I suppose it has got its beauty in it.

I’m not a lecturer, but I have lectured and when I’m lecturing sometimes – I know ’cause that I can get quite excited about when you’re explaining something and obviously that’s because I think what I’m doing is is fascinating and if it’s fascinating, it’s obviously there’s some sort of beauty there. You know, if you get the buzz? 

I sometimes find the actual fascination with what I work with just amazing. And it makes me genuinely happy. Of course, I’m working with genome regulation and evolution which in itself lends itself, to me at least, to a great fascination with the fact that a lot of these things basically operate that way in a very autonomous way, that has happened through like, the refinement of the system over millions of years. And uh, well, I just find it like- I find it like as amazing as really believing that the whole thing was created and it just really, really touches, it really inspires me and makes me want to wonder more – which in the end is what drives me to do more research.

I don’t like that science tends to separate want to separate itself from Arts in general, which – arts for me is like an exploration of the aesthetics – which leads to you some beauty appreciation for that  – and the reason why I reached out specifically on that day [to volunteer] was I just came to the realization that I had this idea, coming from a long way, I don’t have to go into the details now, but that I was really struggling to formulate in scientific terms and I realized that it was a completely aesthetic idea which would still help me to ask better questions eventually, but I was really trying to boil it down to the numbers so I could make an actual research question of it. But it was very hard. I then realized that I didn’t have to and I thought that was really cool. I was extremely lucky that I could have this aesthetic idea to inspire me to do to do research, but then science often like shies away from that and I think it would benefit a lot from the contribution and to seek other means of expression, for example as opposed to just a scientific journal, blah  peer reviewed… I think there’s a lot of space for like, art and beauty in conveying scientific concepts.

I think the duality is like within me in the sense that I feel really inspired and I get a lot of energy from more artistic and aesthetic energy sources. And I don’t feel that it’s reciprocated in the rest of the scientific world, or at least the establishment scientific world. You need to go to really niche groups and you eventually find people who are willing to join everything up 

I find that nature is inherently beautiful, and sometimes I do find that science is kind of spoiling a bit. That means, in the sense that we try to make it so human-readable that it becomes, you know, less magical.

In that aspect, I feel that I’m a bit more open than the rest of the establishment – the field of research – in the sense that I am willing to  let these feelings through, as opposed to thinking, “unless I can explain it scientifically, I cannot”  – which would be in a paper when you write it, you cannot go on about something about beauty because then people would think “he is not serious.” I understand why, because we don’t have to get into the history of science and modernity, but of course it stems from that and the fact that we wanted to distance ourselves from nature. But I don’t agree, I think we are part of nature, and the knowledge is not ours at all. It’s nature’s knowledge and we’re translating into human-readable form.  And that to me already is a beautiful thing, to realize the fact that we’ll never know as much as nature – period. Mainly because it’s infinite information that’s encoded in infinite different ways and we’re still- for example comparative genomics – which is the name that is given to what I do – it’s another universe, in which you literally won’t see the great majority of it unless you do really ridiculous amounts and spend ridiculous amounts of resources. 

It will depend on the person, you can look at, I don’t know clouds, for example, as like ‘adiabatic systems of pressure and air and whatever’ or you can just choose to like look at them as clouds. And we admire the beauty of the cloud  – and it is interesting I understand that, but it’s, I think it’s a lot down to the choice of the person per se, to allow themselves to just be impressed by the raw nature – or have to translate it into numbers and figures. 

In the end, I do want to do a career in the establishment. So this is always something that I have to juggle.

I started as a field biologist, but now it’s like it’s basically I’m doing my field work on my computer and with information in the sense that it’s actually already in a computer. You’re still gleaning some insights into nature, so in that sense, it’s like an astronomer uses a telescope, you can see a bit more and it gives you more wonder. The fact that you’re using a technical contraption in between doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re already filtering it out. It’s just that also with computers, people get the general impression that it’s square and everything’s really [dull], but actually programming is a really creative process and I’ve actually loved every second of it. It’s really very free flow and it can become artistic, it stimulates certain areas of my brain that are not definitely not square.

If I’ve learned something from biology, it’s that there are no lines – as much as we try to put them in. The  exploration for me is really a big [source of beauty], and the formulation of questions. I’m not a fan of writing, to be honest, and that’s especially when you have to fit a certain structure and sometimes – I don’t think I could do any better with writing a poem about my research to be honest, although it’d be a lot more fun admittedly. But with [writing] I feel a bit more conflict.

Then you have the sitting-down-to-think section, which doesn’t happen very often, sadly, in research in general. ‘Cause you’re always working on something, right? And then you don’t get the time to sit down and think, but I feel that those are the best moments. It really depends on the actual moments:  I can be immensely frustrated for 3 hours for example, and then resolve everything, and at the end I’ll be feeling amazing. That’s so good. I sometimes do feel like that happens and I see my work as solving puzzles all the time. 

It’s more like excitement, to be honest. It’s beautiful when I’m able to figure out a really clever algorithm, let’s say, to extract what I want in an easy and quick way. It sounds a bit cocky to say that that’s beautiful – because I made that beautiful thing, but you know…

I think beauty in science is broad, certainly encompassing attractiveness of a system I see in the classic beauty of a flower for example. This also relates to getting to know my local flora that gives me a new appreciation for my surroundings, taking in its full beauty as I dissect the corolla of a weedy purple toadflax, where as before I might simply walk straight past. Yet also complexity is often a source of beauty in science for me – the intertwined web of a gene regulatory network or the intricacy of a molecular metabolic pathway. Furthermore diversity and variation can also be equally as astounding in biology. I was lucky enough to work in Kew herbarium this summer where dried specimens are stored in cupboards of every species of plant ever to be collected to date, some of which may now be extinct. To see in 3D space just how much ROOM this takes up! 5 wings of a huge three story complex and a basement (probably life sciences building x 3!) it gives me a sense of awe and wonder that I think would certainly count as appreciation of beauty.

My background is electronic engineering so I’m first engineer then scientist. And I think it only takes a small amount of extra effort to create something that is beautiful and functional as well. It takes 80% of the effort to create something and with 20% extra you can also make it beautiful. So why not go through that effort, if it will reflect on the reputation of the field, the perception of the general public, or the appreciation of peers in the field for that matter? So for example, just a very simple thing at a few months ago I was designing an experimental stage and it was supported by 4 pneumatic cylinders, which are things that extend with compressed air and according to the mathematics I had enough with three – but it’s a square platform. So how do you arrange 3 dramatic cylinders under square platform? It never looks really good. So I added the fourth cylinder so they have one at every corner. Is there a reason for it? No, except that now it looks beautiful, whereas with three cylinders on a square there would have been no nice way to arrange this. So now the documentations as well, we have a 33% safety margin because there is an extra cylinder. Did it cost a bit more? Yes it did. Did it take more effort? Yes it did, but now it is beautiful and for the next 30 years when it’s going to be used, people will appreciate that for us. Otherwise in next 30 years people will say. How is this ugly thing that is still functional? How did somebody think this would be a good idea? That’s a good example.

I think the beauty is an intrinsic part of the work because it’s not that you build 3 pyramids and then you decide to arrange them in a line. You can’t do that, you have to first think on how to lay them out before you start construction. So somebody definitely did that thinking step before making the decision ‘well, now let’s start building them.’

In the development process you realise well, I have this opportunity to make it greater than it otherwise could be, and then you have to decide for yourself on how much extra time I’m willing to invest in doing that, but ultimately it can be in the conceptual phase like with the Pyramids or it can be throughout the research and design process as well, 

I think it’s fair to admit that a lot of us have, to some extent OCD and like elegance in our work and that’s something I definitely also strive for. [We are] working on the implementation of the deuterium into metallic wires. It’s for a fusion project and we measured the implementation rate and found that it’s proportional to current and inversely proportional to speed. With linear correlation and then just ‘a number’ – but it’s a very ugly number because it’s a combination of all different parameters.So either we say, OK, we take that ugly number, multiply with current, divide by speed and that’s it… But I don’t want to publish that, it doesn’t look very elegant, it’s just a random number. So we spent about a week extra to work out which other parameters influence it, until we had an equation with, I think implementation efficiency and electrolysis efficiency divided by Avogadro’s number, multiplied by elementary charge. So in the end, this really ugly number was transformed into a multiplication and division of four other known physics constants, so the ugly number was gone. Suddenly the equation was a lot larger, but the ugly number was gone and we thought it was well worth investing another week of research into making that equation more elegant. It’s still the same thing but it’s more elegant

The way we implemented it was also beautiful. We invested a lot of work in implementing this process. So we decided we could not afford an ugly equation to represent a beautiful process that we had developed.

It has to do with nuclear fusion, so you could say it’s something that would fascinate a lot of people, not necessarily because getting deuterium implanted in a metallic wire is so spectacular as such, but the implication in the long run will be probably fairly significant, so even in 50 years people will write a textbook about nuclear fusion, and in the history chapter it is mentioned how the first deuterium fuel was implanted in its target material. Then I don’t want that ugly coefficient to be in that textbook. I want to be very elegant equation .

I hope they will appreciate the beauty of this, but isn’t that what we are all doing? Isn’t a painter also somebody who hopes that the people who are viewing their work in an art gallery will appreciate the work for what it is?

It could inspire somebody to dig further into the subject because if you just have like a table with numbers you know, like these matrix multiplications – it’s not very appealing to look into work. If you had a very convoluted theory, but if you have a nice, elegant, simple equation that represents a fairly complex engineering model. Well, that’s something that would intrigue a lot of people – like how does fusion correlate with elementary charge? For example, that’s why we wanted to get an elementary charge in that equation because we thought you’re fusing ions together, so then charge is important. That we want to have that in there. Is it necessary? No, not really, because it’s all a game of numbers in the end. But it adds a bit of beauty to the science

[You could do science without an experience of beauty] yeah, definitely, but it would be much less satisfactory for the people who were working with it – for future generations, because essentially all the science we’re doing is building up on what people did before us, which will then be used by people who come after us to continue the work. So it’s also important that we think of what we pass on to future generations, I think.

I think people use and experience – apply the idea of beauty to actually an overlapping sense of emotions, and it’s not always easy to pin down exactly what you’re feeling. So outside of a scientific context, certainly, you know, when I climb up a mountain in Scotland, or the Alps and look at the view, I think that’s beautiful and I feel a sense of exhilaration or excitement. Which is a different type of experience when looking at a particular artwork that I might find aesthetic appealing or, you know, even a motor car. I don’t drive and I don’t approve of cars, but some designs of car I think – that’s beautiful. Similarly with music. Some things in music which we describe – I would describe as beautiful, are actually invoking some session sense of sadness and melancholy. But I would still describe them as beautiful.

So when it comes to a scientific theory, or scientific discoveries… I personally don’t get that same sense of wonder and exhilaration that I do with the other types of beauty that I’ve described, but there are some scientific theories or designs of experiment or results you get that are just neat and fit perfectly and that does overlap with a sense of beauty, and I suspect that’s, say, how mathematicians describe particular theories of beauty. They just fit in a in a perfect sort of way.  

Part of it is to do with we could call it ‘exploiting’ or at least ‘tapping into’ perceptual processes that have evolved for other reasons. So one can imagine that symmetry, for example, is often perceived as  beautiful in patterns, and I think it’s quite a long stretch to link that to the research on symmetry in bodily or facial proportions which people have argued might be an indicator of genetic quality, or at least developmental stability. I think when I’m looking at a piece of abstract art which has planes of symmetry or a Persian rug which is maybe not exactly symmetrical, but looks pretty symmetrical – that’s I very much doubt that’s tapping into any of my evolved preferences, or preferences I’ve developed, in finding a woman attractive, say. It may relate to efficiency of coding. Julien Renoult would argue that it’s tapping into sparse coding and symmetry certainly can be coded efficiently ’cause you only need to encode half the pattern – so that might be part of it. Discussions about golden sections and particular proportions in art are probably tapping into aspects of how we process the natural world. Certainly, the idea of sparse coding links to the sorts of patterns we see in many natural forms, where there’s sort of scaling, variance and repetition. So that that’s where I think the link would be. It’s tapping into ways we process sensory information which have evolved for other reasons than looking at artwork or listening to music, but they have that effect nevertheless. 

It’d be quite a job to establish what the links are. You know in a similar way that our brains can do calculus and that your brain did not evolve to be able to do calculus. But there are ways about how it’s wired up that allows us to process that sort of mathematical abstraction.

I think it’s deeply interesting because I want to explain nature and why things are as they are, including humans. I think it’s deeply interesting and therefore I find it important. I mean, I think it could be important for practical reasons, in that if you flip to the other side of the coin: certainly some patterns visually, and I daresay types of music, cause distress. They’re disharmonious and we find them irritating and in some cases it can be pathological, where you know particular frequency can evoke an epileptic fit. And there is an established phenomenon of visual discomfort whereby various types of patterns and spatial frequencies we find them unpleasant to look at so that could have practical significance in urban design, say. 

Unless you’re actually researching the aesthetics of beauty I don’t think it’s what science is for by large. It’s an important part of the business of science in as far as it helps motivate the people doing the science and it helps get other people interested in the science that they’re doing.

It’s certainly a powerful motivation for people to do [science], so understanding what can excite you about science might have practical significance in terms of education. If you want to pull more people or people of particular demographics into science, then understanding what it is about science that’s appealing or appealing to some people and not others would help.

Part of it is to do with we could call it ‘exploiting’ or at least ‘tapping into’ perceptual processes that have evolved for other reasons. So one can imagine that symmetry, for example, is often perceived as  beautiful in patterns, and I think it’s quite a long stretch to link that to the research on symmetry in bodily or facial proportions which people have argued might be an indicator of genetic quality, or at least developmental stability. I think when I’m looking at a piece of abstract art which has planes of symmetry or a Persian rug which is maybe not exactly symmetrical, but looks pretty symmetrical – that’s I very much doubt that’s tapping into any of my evolved preferences, or preferences I’ve developed, in finding a woman attractive, say. It may relate to efficiency of coding. Julien Renoult would argue that it’s tapping into sparse coding and symmetry certainly can be coded efficiently ’cause you only need to encode half the pattern – so that might be part of it. Discussions about golden sections and particular proportions in art are probably tapping into aspects of how we process the natural world. Certainly, the idea of sparse coding links to the sorts of patterns we see in many natural forms, where there’s sort of scaling, variance and repetition. So that that’s where I think the link would be. It’s tapping into ways we process sensory information which have evolved for other reasons than looking at artwork or listening to music, but they have that effect nevertheless. 

It’d be quite a job to establish what the links are. You know in a similar way that our brains can do calculus and that your brain did not evolve to be able to do calculus. But there are ways about how it’s wired up that allows us to process that sort of mathematical abstraction.

I think it’s deeply interesting because I want to explain nature and why things are as they are, including humans. I think it’s deeply interesting and therefore I find it important. I mean, I think it could be important for practical reasons, in that if you flip to the other side of the coin: certainly some patterns visually, and I daresay types of music, cause distress. They’re disharmonious and we find them irritating and in some cases it can be pathological, where you know particular frequency can evoke an epileptic fit. And there is an established phenomenon of visual discomfort whereby various types of patterns and spatial frequencies we find them unpleasant to look at so that could have practical significance in urban design, say.

Unless you’re actually researching the aesthetics of beauty I don’t think it’s what science is for by large. It’s an important part of the business of science in as far as it helps motivate the people doing the science and it helps get other people interested in the science that they’re doing.

It’s certainly a powerful motivation for people to do [science], so understanding what can excite you about science might have practical significance in terms of education. If you want to pull more people or people of particular demographics into science, then understanding what it is about science that’s appealing or appealing to some people and not others would help.

I think there’s beauty in anything if you look hard enough. My work specifically? I think studying the natural world and discovering basic truths about the universe is beautiful – maybe not in the aesthetic sense, but I think it’s a beautiful project. The systems I study are appearing at an emergent level of complexity. Life is one level of complexity, but so is chemistry and physics, just at lower levels, so I think by studying any kind of science, or at least the science I’m studying now, is tapping into a specific slice of complexity in the universe, which I think it’s beautiful to be able to see. 

I think the things I’m looking at are just a bit like a window into some kind of deeper underlying principles for me. I study ants and I’m not – I do think ants are cool, but I’m not crazy about ants, not that crazy. It feels bigger than to me than just ants, you know? It’s like some underlying principles can probably apply across scales maybe from physics upwards. So, life, consciousness… Who knows?

Something which I find beautiful, quite regularly it gets me, is when I think about the fractal nature of life and ants are an organized system but the organization applies across scales. It’s like really amazing to me when I think about that. The organization of atoms leading to coordination molecules to cells and then from cells to individuals and even individuals to a whole ant colony. I see that in ants, but also just trees, they’re quite obviously fractal. So that’s something I see as beautiful.

Social interactions between [ants], I think that’s really beautiful. Just seeing how components of a system are interacting. Recently I’ve been looking at their nest architecture as well and whenever I get these images from a CT scan and you can see the three-dimensional architecture, there’s something so intrinsically beautiful about that structure which is being made by something and which I’m able to access. Even from an aesthetic aspect they’re [beautiful]

I think just by doing science on something, you’re just by nature looking very, very hard and deeply at something. And that in itself can reveal some beauty and maybe you find something out about that as well and that can be beautiful as well. But maybe there’s two things there.

If I was just looking at an Excel spreadsheet. It’s not something I would find beautiful. But when you get to a point where you can visualize it, maybe you can see a nice curve or – that would be the most boring form of visualization, to be honest, if you’re just looking at like a box plot or a curve of what some behavior’s doing over time  -that can be beautiful, definitely exciting and yeah, it may be beautiful. And then, you know, you can definitely get more interesting visualizations, which I suppose they’re just tapping into – you know, there are other ways of visualizing what is going on in our system and they can definitely be beautiful, for sure. 

I look at data quite broadly. I would consider what I was talking about before – the chambers of ants’ nests – I think that’s a form of data, even if you haven’t properly quantified it.

It’s tricky because the work I’m doing now, ironically, is very much, oriented towards applicability in conservation. It’s something like building a tool, a way of understanding what we can do to understand population collapse in nature… Which is something I like, but I don’t know if I would describe that [beauty] feeling that I was talking about before in this particular project. Whilst still the observation of some species of my model study, which is protists -in that part, in that bit of the work, checking the stocks, making them grow, and just looking at them being, is still something that gives me that burst. So in that part, the observation and the recognition of which species is which and what are they doing? Feeling my model study [organisms] as a being in itself, it has a beauty in it. And the more applicable part of actually using the machines or the microscope is something I like, but I don’t know if it’s something more rational, let’s say. – Which is a different kind of good feeling when you do it, or when you’re understanding how it works, or when you mastered the craft, let’s say. I don’t know if I would define that what I do by day today is beautiful though.

It depends how we define data because there is some beautifulness in a study that brings you to, for example, a big plot with data and you understand those data and those data that follows a pattern, let’s say a line, is just beautiful – sometimes. But I like more the beauty of the information itself more than like a physical representation of the data. I know many friends of mine or people that like it more than me, they say “look at this beautiful plot.” – OK, it’s good. The colors are pretty, of course, but it’s the information behind it – which, coming from a background in which much information is “This animal does this” – and you don’t really look at it on a plot. It’s just like, I think I fell in love with this, with ecology and zoology in general, because it used to be 200 years ago an observation-based science. People were just there in nature, looking and writing, “OK, the parrots are doing this” – and you don’t need a plot to see that – that information is beautiful. The possibility of sharing that when the next time you walk in the forest and use that power, you can tell your friend that you know that that parrot is going to do it and then it does it– and that is what I find, the information part of the data, much better than the representation 

[beauty is in] different parts and they’re acting on different layers … the ones that stand out first, it’s just I’ve always been fascinated by ants like. It’s how they they work together as a group. There’s pictures of me, like 7 years old, lying on the street, not the payment – on the street, because on the edge from the street to the pavement there was an Ant colony and I was observing them for hours and, yeah, I think, many people say nature is beautiful in some way or form, and to me that’s especially true for ants. 

And then I think the second layer is. The ideas about the ants. Like how successful they have become ecologically, how they manage to function as a group? – To be that successful? Just these overall ideas. From one ant is so strong then that many ants and somehow they work together. Yeah, I think that’s also a beautiful aspect and the science we’re doing in our team is trying to understand that. And so just looking at different aspects of their social life and seeing why that’s working, it’s the way.

… I wouldn’t have an ant tattoo of anything that I would think that’s just not beautiful. So yes, I have no problem looking at ants for hours.

[in the lab ] the nature of the ants is not changed, even though you change their environment to something very artificial. I think I always take a bit too much time in feeding my ants, which is like. “Oh I’m putting the sugar water, and suddenly there’s few ants with the sugar-water and like, I just have to look how they suck up the sugar water and run back. Then suddenly there’s two more ants coming – you know, there’s a trail and yeah, I think I could be more efficient, but I always have to quickly check, “how are you doing?”

I do feel like I see beauty in my work – I work in experimental physics, and there is a beauty to the microscale design of items that I work on, as well as in finding data and presenting this (graphs etc.).