The Mystery of Beauty

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. In December 1968, the crew of NASA's Apollo 8 spacecraft became the first human beings to orbit the moon. The astronauts on board— Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders— had a stunning view of Earth rising over the lunar horizon. That Christmas Eve, a televised broadcast of the event became the most-watched TV program at the time.

Oh my God, look at that picture over there. There's the Earth coming up.

Wow, that pretty.

William Anders captured the moment in a photograph that came to be known as Earthrise. It showed our planet in a way people had never before seen: a vivid blue and white orb suspended against the vastness of space. Earthrise wasn't just a beautiful photograph. It became a symbol of the environmental movement and had a profound impact on how people view our planet— beautiful, but fragile and deserving of our protection. The picture inspired the launch of Earth Day. It's a global movement that is still around decades later. It involves billions of people around the world. All of this Inspired by a simple, beautiful image. This week on Hidden Brain, the power of beauty— why we are so moved by it, the ways it influences our behavior, and how our attraction to beauty might unlock the secrets of the universe. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Southern New Hampshire University. The brain isn't fixed. It's flexible. That means we're always capable of transformation. A master's degree from SNHU can help you build the skills to become whoever you want: a leader, career changer, dream chaser. With no set class times and low online tuition, SNHU makes grad school possible. Because it's never too late to learn something new. Get started at snhu.edu/brain. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Planet Visionaries. Professional climber and environmental advocate Alex Honnold hosts Planet Visionaries, a podcast spotlighting the people tackling climate challenges with real hopeful solutions. Throughout season 6, Alex brings together extraordinary changemakers for powerful conversations about grit, determination, and the power of hope to fuel our fight for a better future. In partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, this is Planet Visionaries. Listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Progressive. Whoever says saving money is hard doesn't know that new customers who bundle and save with Progressive save hundreds. Because switching your home and auto insurance is better than cutting down on those iced lattes you love. Switch to Progressive and see if you could save. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company, affiliates, and other insurers. Not available in all states. In the early 1990s, Anjan Chatterjee was a young neuroscientist working at the University of Birmingham in Alabama. On Fridays, Anjan and 2 colleagues would get together at a local hangout to talk about work and life.

And the place we got together was a bar. that was close to— across the street from where I lived in Birmingham called Garages. And just to set the scene, this is one of these beautiful central courtyards with architectural remnants and wrought iron chairs and magnolia trees, an aesthetically pleasing place to be talking about ideas and talking about life.

One evening, as they sat under the magnolia tree sipping their drinks, Anjan's friend Brit posed a question.

Imagine yourself 10 years in the future. What would you regret that you hadn't done with respect to your work, looking backwards? Brit was fond of asking these meta questions. And it was a nice way— because there was also going to be a transition in my life. I was going to move to a new place, new lab. to also generally reevaluate how I wanted to direct my attention.

Anjan knew the answer to his friend's question. He wanted to study beauty. He had always been interested in art. As a young boy growing up in India, he spent many hours drawing pictures of landscapes, wondering what made them beautiful. As a neuroscientist, Anjan was still interested in that question. He wanted to understand the science of aesthetics. Why are we drawn to beautiful things, and how does the mind process beauty? Even more interestingly, what happens in the minds of artists when they produce beautiful works?

When I started to look at this in the late '90s, there was virtually nothing written about it from the point of view of neuroscience.

There are many ways to study these questions, but one technique is to observe patients who have suffered some kind of neurological damage.

Anjan began studying artists who had different neurological deficits, like Parkinson's disease, to see what effect it had on their art. If a stroke or a brain disorder changes the way people perceive or produce art, it tells you that the affected area was playing a role in aesthetics. In some rare cases, Anjan says, brain damage seems to enhance people's capacity for art.

It's a paradox because on the one hand, you might think that art is the highest expression of our humanity. And yet, with brain damage, it's— we don't ever talk about how someone's language gets better. We don't talk about how their emotional processing or their Decision-making gets better, and yet here in some instances, people can have brain damage or neurologic disease and their art changes and changes in a way that some people find more appealing. The point is not that if you get brain damage, your art will get better, but under some circumstances that happens. So we see this in some degenerative conditions, in particularly a group of disorders called frontotemporal dementia. It is seen sometimes in people with autism that have very impressive graphic skills and sometimes in people with Parkinson's disease, especially after they've been put on medications to help with their dopamine system, dopamine agonists. And so why is that? What is going on? What is this telling us about the nature of art, the nature of art production, and how it's organized in the brain?

Anjan vividly recalls one patient with Parkinson's disease. It's a disorder that is linked to disruptions in the production of the neurotransmitter dopamine. As we have explored in other episodes, dopamine plays an important role in motivation and in the experience of pleasure. Treatments for Parkinson's often involve dopamine agonists, drugs that mimic the effects of dopamine.

He, as a young man, had studied graphic design. And then had gone into business. And so that design background receded in his everyday life. But then he developed Parkinson's disease and rented space in a studio and found that he kept going back there. And then when he got placed on dopamine agonists, he found it compelling. He gave the example of riding a train. Where you're presented with a wonderful meal, but your stop is coming up and feeling a compulsion that you have to finish eating your meal to be able to get through it. So—

So he had that feeling with art, that there was sort of an urgency to his desire to go to the studio and to basically work on his art.

Absolutely. And he would go there at 5:00 in the morning and spend, you know, 12, 14, 16 hours a day doing his artwork and became really Can I just stay with that for a second?

Did you talk to him and sort of ask him what was going on? Did you have any interactions with him? I mean, that's— to go to sort of discover art sort of relatively late in your life and then have it turn into something of an obsession, that is fascinating.

Yeah, we talked to him quite a bit. We even went out to his studio to actually see what he was doing, and he would There would be certain themes that he would focus on and keep working on, keep working on, certain kinds of visual themes that he would continue to work on, and this is quite characteristic in these conditions. They tended to be somewhat abstract representations. He lived in an apartment that overlooked a city park called Washington Square, and so he had these sets of square images.

Right.

that if you didn't know what they were, you wouldn't necessarily know it was a city park, but there was this kind of geometry built into these squares, for example.

Another case Anjan has studied involved an artist named Katherine Sherwood. She was also a professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

And when she was 44 years old, she was teaching a graduate seminar and had a stroke in the class.

Oh my God.

Fell down, had a very large left hemisphere stroke. And after that, she had a pretty limited vocabulary initially and couldn't speak very well. And initially was quite depressed and then gradually came out of it and went back to doing her artwork. And her artwork changed and changed in a way that other people have found quite interesting. She herself describes her art as before her stroke having been very meticulous, very analytic, very careful, very controlled, and after her stroke feeling that there was a looseness, a fluidity to her imagery.

Mm-hmm.

And that is evident when you look at her art.

You know, people have talked for a while about the role of the 2 hemispheres in the brain. And of course, this work has been, you know, sometimes oversimplified. But there is some connection between the fact that she had the left hemisphere stroke. In other words, her left hemisphere has now been impeded. And the role that neuroscientists have identified the left hemisphere playing in terms of being able to be precise in executing various actions. So in some ways, she lost precision to some extent, but perhaps by— in addition to losing precision, she also gained something in terms of being less inhibited in terms of what she was depicting.

Yes, I think that's right. We do try to emphasize that this idea that has been around a lot of the right hemisphere somehow being dominant for art is, as you say, quite a simplification because you can look at people with right brain damage and they also have changes in how they produce art. That can be quite striking.

And so the point that you're making is that the brain has a certain equilibrium, if you will, between different competing or collaborating elements. And when you have some kind of brain damage or a stroke or a disorder, some of those elements can be thrown out of whack. And this can sometimes result in just people not being able to perform things and not being able to do things. But you're saying sometimes it can also result in a new equilibrium that is achieved that produces a different kind of art.

Yes, absolutely. And I think one of the things this tells us is how art is not just one thing. If you think of famous artists, if you think of a Mark Rothko, that's not the same as what Rembrandt was doing. It's not the same as what El Greco was doing, right? So even though we call all of these things art, The nature of the representation, what's trying to be communicated, what— the configuration of that can be very, very different.

When we come back, scientific experiments that explore how the brain produces art, experiences art, and is moved by beauty. Also, the $64 million question: why does the human brain care so much It doesn't make sense.

We don't have sex with art. We don't eat art, right? In what sense is this an instinct?

You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Progressive. Whoever says saving money is hard doesn't know that new customers who bundle and save with Progressive save hundreds. Because switching your home and auto insurance is better than cutting down on those iced lattes you love. Switch to Progressive and see if you could save. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company, affiliates, and other insurers. Not available in all states. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Quince. We all have those pieces in our closet that we can count on: the versatile jacket, the perfect t-shirt. These are the pieces that make getting dressed easy, and that's what Quince does best. Quince makes elevated everyday essentials using premium materials in designs that are timeless, thoughtfully crafted, and made to be worn again and again. And when the temperatures start to drop, Quince makes it easy to build on these everyday staples with versatile layers designed to keep you warm and comfortable all season long. Find your next fall favorites at Quince. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was Hidden Brain. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. When Anjan Chatterjee was growing up in India, he spent a lot of time drawing landscapes. He wasn't a neuroscientist at that time, but he found himself asking a question that was very much about the brain. Why did some landscapes look beautiful while others did not? After he became a researcher, Anjan decided to study the neuroscience of aesthetic experience. In one study, He evaluated how easily and automatically people make aesthetic judgments.

We had a set of faces that were computer-generated so that they weren't of actual people. And we had these faces normed on how attractive they were. And people came to the scanner in 2 different sessions. In one condition, they're seeing a series of faces and they're making a judgment of how attractive they think the faces are. In the other, They're making an identity judgment, which is, have they seen this face before? So it's a familiarity condition. Separately from that, we, in each person, identified certain parts of our visual cortex. Our visual cortex tends to be tuned to different aspects of the world. So there's an area called the fusiform gyrus that is especially tuned to faces, an area within the parahippocampus that is tuned to environments. So the first observation is that when people came and they're making judgments of how attractive they think the faces are, where aesthetics is explicitly on the table, what we see is that there is increased neural activity that varies with how attractive the faces are, and not in a generalized way in the sense that the area of the brain that is processing buildings and landscapes is not responsive to this parameter.

So in other words, people are sensitive to attractive faces, and you're picking up, to some extent, the signature of what this looks like in the brain.

Right. And the interesting thing about this experiment is that when people are making an identity judgment, so aesthetics is not on the table, they have the same kind of response to how attractive the faces are within their occipital cortex. The suggestion being that our visual cortex is responding to whatever value is there in these attractive faces, even when we are being asked to do something else.

Hmm. It's almost like it's operating in the background outside of our control almost automatically.

Exactly. It's— I mean, not to make too much of a pun of it, it is a hidden brain response.

Yeah. Yeah. So the interesting thing here, of course, is that People are factoring in aesthetic questions or questions about attractiveness even in domains where it's completely irrelevant or not useful. Of course, this has all kinds of implications for how we behave and walk in the world, but it does point to something that I think is one dimension of how many of us think about beauty, which is we think about beauty in terms of other people. All of us have had the experience of seeing someone very beautiful either on a movie screen or on a television show or in real life and feeling almost our throats catch or our hearts skip a beat because we're so struck by how beautiful they are. Can you just talk a moment about our sensitivity to human beauty as one of our earliest exposures to the nature of beauty itself?

Yeah, it's quite striking. Most people have, as you said, this experience of people that we find quite beautiful. And if we think about the words that sometimes we use For attractive people that are similar to beauty, we use words like glamorous and charming and enthralling, enchanting. These are all magic words. There's a sense in which that there's something magical about this experience. It turns out that people are quite consistent across cultures with the kinds of faces that people find attractive and that We respond to these faces in, as you say, an automatic fashion. It turns out that infants are also responsive to faces that adults think are attractive. So this does seem to be a kind of response that most people have, which is to the attractiveness of the way people look.

Tell me about the work that's been done on very young children and their perceptions of attractiveness.

Yeah. Some of this work is really fascinating. It turns out that infants, even younger than 6 months, will look at faces preferentially or for longer that adults regard as attractive. They will look at them longer and preferentially. Around the age of 6 months, there have been some studies that showed that they actually have a category of what is attractive and what is unattractive.

And this would suggest in some ways that this is, in some ways, not just being influenced by the culture, right? Because presumably these very small infants, they're not reading People magazine and they're not watching Bollywood movies.

Yes, that is the inference that we think that there is something core about the way our minds are made up. And there may be some evolutionary arguments to support that, that this is something that is really fundamental in how our brains are organized.

I want to talk a moment about, you know, why it is our brains come predisposed to perceive aesthetics at all. You can imagine that you could, you know, you could run a brain that basically is able to see things and taste things and navigate the world and have communication, but doesn't sit in front of a painting at an art museum or listen for 2 hours to a musical concert or, you know, it seems at some level superfluous to basically say we spend so much of our time, you know, caring about what is beautiful in the world. And many of us spend enormous amounts of time caring about what's beautiful. What are your theories about why it is we have this capacity in the brain in the first place?

Yeah. So the general idea is that We, over long periods of time, adapt to our environment and adapt in a way that helps us survive and helps us have children that survive. And when it comes to what we find attractive in other people, the idea is that the parameters that we tend to find beautiful were also indicators of health, which meant the greater possibility of having more children, which meant that those kinds of preference and trait combinations get propagated in a population.

So what does this mean for sort of physical attractiveness, for example?

So what this means, for example, is that the sorts of parameters for physical attractiveness in faces have tended to be symmetry. The idea there is that this is a marker for immunocompetence in the sense that during this long period before the modern era, that we tended to die from infectious causes, parasites that typically, whether it's in plants or animals or humans, tend to be disfiguring. So there is that.

The theory, in other words, is that we're drawn to symmetry because symmetry serves as a signal of health. Another trait that Anjan and others have found people are drawn to is something called averaging.

That if you have a bunch of faces and you combine them, which we can now do digitally quite easily, that the averaged face tends to be more attractive than the individual faces contributing to the averaging. The idea is that this might represent a greater genetic mix, right? You've got these phenotypes, how people look, that are being combined, suggesting that you've got a more diverse and robust genetic profile, which improves your immune system. So that also promotes health. And so I want to be clear, it's not the case— we don't expect that a 17-, 18-, 19-year-old is looking at someone and saying, oh, I think that person is really healthy. That's why I'm attracted to them, that that's a kind of epiphenomenon and outcome of these kinds of traits that the hypothetical groups of people who found those features attractive were more likely to survive over long periods of time. At least that's the kind of ideas that people use when we talk about the evolution of beauty in people.

And in some ways, I guess sort of the extension of this argument would be that once the brain comes predisposed, To see sort of other humans as beautiful or not beautiful or to take pleasure in food, for example, then you have to have the architecture in the brain that is able to process, you know, have visual processing and the experience of a reward or the experience of pleasure. And in some ways, art sort of sits on top of those things. Can you talk about that idea that in some ways art might also be downstream of some of these more basic—

Yeah.

Yeah, I think that's exactly right, and we can put architecture in there as well. So the empirical evidence suggests that when you look at faces and landscapes, natural landscapes, people tend to be quite consistent. When you look at human artifacts, which would be art, and then architecture falls somewhere in between landscapes and art, people are much more variable. And so I think the kinds of pleasures we can get from art and architecture rests on those very primitive and basic systems, but art and architecture are also more variable, and this is where the kind of cultural overlay, the personal meaning, the personal histories also has an effect on something that is already riding on a more fundamental and basic set of relationships between our sensory perceptions and the rewards that we get from them. A few years ago, I was invited to give a talk in London at the Royal Society of Medicine on aesthetics. And the person who invited me was an ophthalmologist. And we're walking along a particular part of London. It's very organized. Everything is off-white, very geometric. And he just commented on, isn't this beautiful? And if you grew up in India or in places, probably in the Global South, the first question is, where's the color? There's no color, right? I can appreciate in a desiccated way how coherent and organized this was, and there's a pattern to it. But for me, the absence of color was a problem. And so that's just a simple example of how our cultural backgrounds and what we're used to can have an effect on our experience of the same environment.

Anjan and his colleagues argue that aesthetic appreciation in the brain is shaped by what they call an aesthetic triad. Brighter colors are more arresting than dull colors. Artistic expression that hooks into the centers of the brain that process emotions and meaning is more evocative than art that does not. And in the physical domain, skilled movement stimulates parts of our brains that control motor activity. This is why it can feel beautiful to watch a graceful dancer or an athlete?

I follow basketball quite a bit, and there is this combination of athleticism and grace and beauty and amazement of the kind of control of somebody's body that one can have. When I was in college, Julius Erving played in Philadelphia, and he was even called Dr. J as a way of acknowledging his skill and his mastery. And he seemed to defy laws of physics, the way he could hang and the way his body could twist in air. And there's a beauty to that. Here's Julius. Yes, sir.

The doctor. Boy, what a move. Take that one.

When I watch Dr. J soaring through the air, it's as if gravity doesn't apply to him. I can't help but feel a sense of wonder. I'm clearly not alone, judging from the millions of views of YouTube videos of Dr. J playing basketball.

Dr. on his second strong move to the hoop. They did not shut off the middle.

I feel much the same when I watch the world's best soccer players score impossible goals or athletes perform dazzling feats at the Olympics.

People will sometimes refer to soccer as the beautiful game. You can look at some runners, some jumpers, and their form— there's a grace and an elegance to their movements that can be breathtaking.

Oh, good jump!

Is that—

yes, I think he's happy with that!

I think there are at least 2 components, which is the elegance of movement, which you also see, for example, among dancers. And then there is a kind of mastery that we also find very appealing, and sometimes we have this feeling with, with very accomplished artists that there is a skill and a mastery that can be quite striking, especially people that are performing at the highest levels of their sport.

Can we talk a little bit about the aesthetics involved in science and in mathematics? Because I think you've done some thinking about this as well, that in some ways, you know, we can perceive mathematical constructs or ideas to also be beautiful in the same way that you can perceive, you know, Julius Erving on the basketball court or, you know, a supermodel on a fashion cover, that it has sort of the same effect on us.

Can you talk about that and why that might be the case?

Why would— You could sort of draw a connection between the supermodel and perhaps the athlete and sort of some of the evolutionary things that we talked about, the potential connections with survival and reproduction. Why in the world would we find chess strategies beautiful or mathematics beautiful or scientific equations or the theory of evolution or things that sort of summarize or explain the world? Why would we have similar aesthetic experiences about those things, Anjan?

Yeah, it's a fascinating question. If we go back to the aesthetic triad and we think about mathematics or strategies in chess, this is really about the kind of the meaning and the semantics part of it, right? There's no obvious sensory qualities to this, right? So somehow meaning is driving this, this kind of pleasure that we get from these relationships. relationships. And one possibility is that that kind of coherence that's produced in something that otherwise might appear to be chaotic is a kind of aha, a feeling of, oh, there's some elegance to this, right? In all of this chaos, there's something coherent that if we understood it, then we find it to be beautiful. You know, the developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik She's talking about this in infants and how when infants, when they understand something, their face lights up with joy, right? There's a joy to understanding. And it may be that the particular predisposition to get joy out of explanation, right, allowed people to look at complex phenomena and—

Yeah.

understand them, and then be able to predict what might happen in a way that has survival value.

In this telling, our aesthetic appreciation is a byproduct of what is functional. If the ability to admire graceful footwork on a soccer field, or make sense of the world in a mathematical equation, or spot a good-looking person across the room increases our chances of survival and reproduction, our brains will be sculpted by evolution to derive pleasure from doing those things. Beauty, in other words, is a byproduct of what is useful. When we come back, a different perspective. Is it possible that beauty is not just a product of our minds, but an objective feature of the universe? You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Instagram. Instagram Teen Accounts' automatic protections limit who can contact teens, the content they can see, and the time they spend on the app. Teens are automatically placed into Teen Accounts. Teens under 16 will need a parent's permission to change any of those settings to be less strict. Learn more about Teen Accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online at instagram.com/teenaccounts.

Working as a dedicated Fidelity advisor, I always ask, what's important to you? I'll look at those priorities and goals alongside your full financial picture I look at the financial picture to build a comprehensive plan designed to help grow and protect your wealth. With proactive portfolio insights and an eye on taxes, I'm here to help you make the most of your money. I'm Laura Maxwell, and I'm a dedicated Fidelity advisor. Learn more at fidelity.com/wealth. Investment minimums apply. Fidelity Brokerage Services, LLC, member NYSE SIPC.

Support for Hidden Brain comes from Air France. Air France business cabin offers comfort throughout the journey with priority check-in, boarding, and lounge access. Onboard, enjoy menus from renowned French chefs, wines and champagne selected by a sommelier, and free high-speed Wi-Fi. When it's time to rest, settle into a fully adjustable lie-flat bed with added mattress comfort. The art of travel elevated, because Air France business cabin goes further in every detail to make your journey exceptional. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Frank Wilczek is a theoretical physicist and mathematician at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2004, he won the Nobel Prize for his work on quantum chromodynamics. But long before he was a Nobel Prize winner, Frank was a curious kid who enjoyed tinkering with everyday objects. One of his earliest memories involves taking apart his father's coffee percolator.

I was on the floor and the percolator was on the floor and it had 7 pieces, and they were big pieces so I could handle it, take them apart and put it back together. And this idea of things making sense and that you could take them apart and put them together and that I could take them apart and put them together made a big impression on me. In fact, it was sort of at that moment that I realized that there was an inner world and an outer world.

Right.

That they were different things, you know, that I could manipulate the world to a certain extent.

When Frank was a bit older, he became fascinated by something called the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram. It's a chart that scientists use to plot stars based on their temperature and brightness.

Hotter stars tend to be brighter, but not necessarily, because they might also be small. So these are really separate things. And what turns out is that in this diagram, the dots, they could have been scattered all over the plane, but they, they actually form a couple of arcs that you can interpret as stars that have different structures. I don't think I understood the details at the time, but just the idea that you could find regularities and understand them based on profound physical principles made a big impression on me, that, gee, I'd like to really understand that.

Yeah.

You know, all of us have seen, I think, textbooks where we see, you know, the description of stars and the cosmos, and we sort of see how these can be explained on the page with mathematical equations. But I think what you're pointing out is actually how remarkable this is, that in fact you're describing things that are millions, hundreds of millions of light-years away, and something on a page is able to capture something true about something that is literally astronomically far away.

Yeah, but it's even— to me, it goes even deeper than that. The fact that you can make a precise mapping between concepts and reality, that to me is the central miracle of the Scientific Revolution, that we shouldn't settle for anything less than a really profound understanding. And the fact that you can extrapolate that not only to things we can measure in a laboratory, but to stars and the cosmos, is just sort of the cherry on the sundae of this miracle.

In the 1970s, Frank began studying physics at Princeton. As he learned about the famous discoveries of the 20th century, he realized there was a curious connection between the worlds of science and aesthetics.

In 20th century physics, as people started to investigate the insides of atoms, experiments became much more difficult. So sort of a data-driven account of the world became very much more difficult to pull off because the data is hard to get. And what turned out to be the right strategy was to guess that there might be a simple, beautiful underlying description, and then work out its consequences enough so that people could do a few experiments to test if the ideas were right. And this process of guessing— how do you guess? Well, you guess— first of all, you have to be consistent with everything we know. So that's a very constrained kind of guessing. But secondly, you look for things that are beautiful. You look for things that are symmetrical, that are compact. These kinds of aesthetic considerations have more and more come to dominate how people try to find new laws of fundamental physics.

Hmm. So let me unpack 2 things here, because this is really interesting. What you're saying is that at some level, once the experimental data turned out to be limited, it became easier in some ways to come up with theories. But in fact, the theories could have gone in any number of different directions. And so the choice becomes, which of these theories do you think is more likely or more plausible? And you're suggesting that many scientists in the course of the 20th century chose the theories that, that seemed aesthetically pleasing or parsimonious, at least, as a guide to the truth?

Well, people try all different kinds of things, but the thing that actually worked and broke through in the field was guessing some beautiful equations based on a few crucial facts, and then sticking with those equations. And even though at first we could calculate very, very little, they seemed to be okay, and now we can calculate a lot.

One beautiful equation all of us are familiar with is E= mc². Einstein's special theory of relativity explains how speed and mass affect time and space. When Einstein proposed this theory in the early 1900s, there was limited data to support it. But Einstein was guided by a preference for simplicity and elegance in his scientific pursuits. As the physicist Wolfgang Rindler wrote, to equate all mass with energy required an act of aesthetic faith, very characteristic of Einstein. Decades after Einstein proposed E=mc², Frank and his colleagues were searching for another equation, one that would describe what happens inside the nucleus of an atom.

Basically, the electromagnetic force survives right down to atomic distance.

In case you're not a quantum physicist, let me attempt to translate what Frank is saying. Imagine the nucleus of an atom is a tiny room filled with positively charged protons. Because these protons all have the same charge, they should be repelling each other, like magnets that push each other away. But this doesn't happen in the tiny room. Instead, a mysterious force holds the protons together like a very strong glue. It seemed to defy the existing laws of physics.

People did all kinds of experiments to try to elucidate what this force was, and it got very complicated very fast. So there was no clear path forward until, I would say, in retrospect, it's much clearer that the decisive experiments were done starting in the late 1960s when people learned how to make snapshots of what's going on inside protons.

Frank set out to solve the mystery of what was happening inside the nucleus of the atom.

And that showed that protons are made out of smaller things, what we call quarks. There were hints of this before, but not, not, wasn't really clear. And, and there was also something else that's, that had to hold the quarks together. And these were called gluons, but no one knew what they were. And, uh, so we, we wanted to guess equations that did justice to the behavior that those experiments were revealing.

Armed with these snapshots, Frank and his colleagues tried to explain how these particles behaved.

There was this very strange behavior of the quarks that they had the forces become weak when they are close together, but get stronger as they get far apart. So this is very different from gravity, for instance, or electromagnetic forces, which get stronger as you go to shorter distances. And, uh, it's more like the behavior of rubber bands, right? The force gets very flaccid when they're close together, but they get tense when you try to pull them very far apart. And that's what we started. We made a breakthrough discovery of a force that started to behave this way, started to get weaker as you go towards shorter distances and higher energies. This was my first serious investigation in physics or anything really. I was 21 years old. I didn't have a lot of experience. I didn't know what to expect. I was quite conscious of the fact that we were making very bold extrapolations based on a few experiments and ignoring the vast bulk of experimental physics.

It was risky, but Frank and his colleagues stuck their necks out. They proposed a new model for the inner workings of the atom.

We were led to a unique candidate set of equations, which is now called quantum electrodynamics. And as in the cases we've discussed before, at first the data was very sparse, very difficult to interpret. Very few people believed us. I'm not sure I believed it myself, but people did experiments at higher energies, and, and then the picture clarifies a lot because the behavior gets simpler and you Actually see the quarks, see the gluons, check that they have the properties that these equations predict. And so it's a great success story.

Do you think you were guided by aesthetics in your discovery of these equations, or do you think after you discovered the equations, they look beautiful because in fact they are beautiful because they're so simple or so parsimonious?

No, it would be impossible to conceive of the equations without looking for mathematical beauty. These equations are embodiments of symmetry, and that's the only way they could have been discovered practically.

You and others have sort of talked about 2 elements of things that make mathematics and physics beautiful. One of them is symmetry, and the other one is efficiency. And I'm wondering if we can talk about each of these in turn.

Talk about the idea of symmetry, Frank.

Yeah.

Well, in common language, symmetry has kind of fuzzy meaning, but in science, we need more definite concepts. So the concept of symmetry that's turned out to be fruitful is change without change. Now, what does that mean? Well, for example, a circle is very symmetrical. Because, with this definition, because you can rotate it around its center by any angle, and although every point on it moves, the circle as a whole does not. So you make a change that doesn't change things. And that concept can be applied not only to shapes, but to equations. into laws. As we discussed briefly before, in 20th century physics, it's turned out that the successful equations have been equations based on extraordinarily large amounts of symmetry.

Can you talk about the idea of efficiency? And, I mean, people think of efficiency in sort of a productivity sense. You know, I was efficient, or this company works efficiently. But you're using it perhaps similarly, but also somewhat differently. Why is efficiency a measure of beauty?

The idea is that you can have a very compact set of principles or program, if you like, in different contexts, that when you unfold its consequences, explains an enormous amount or produces an enormous amount.

For example, think about the theory of evolution. It has a few basic principles. Organisms reproduce, their offspring come in variants, and natural selection causes some variants to become numerous. This simple concept, applied over billions of years, has produced the endless forms most beautiful that Charles Darwin wrote about, the vast canopy of life forms on Earth.

And the fact that that can be done is extraordinarily beautiful because you have— you get out more than you put in. And it's also very empowering because it enables you to do things that you couldn't do before.

I'm wondering whether you've given any thought, Frank, to why it is that beauty might in fact be a guide to the truth. As you pointed out earlier, there's no reason why things that are beautiful have to be true.

Have you given any thought to why?

In fact, there might be a connection?

Oh yeah, I've given a lot of thought to it. And I think it probably has a lot to do with evolution and the fact that we're— what is beauty after all? It's a human concept and people define it in different ways. But certainly part of the meaning and maybe the essence of it is something is beautiful if we like to come back to it and understand interact with it. And it can be useful in getting around with the world and having offspring that survive and survive is being able to understand how the world works. The fact that we find it beautiful to have explanations of how the world works, I don't think is an accident because we're evolved to try to understand how things work.

Yeah. We're sense-making creatures, as psychologists would say.

Right. Yeah. So we impose structure on the world, and we try to drill deeper and deeper. I guess the miracle part is that it's worked as well as it has. I think Einstein said it right. He said, the most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it's comprehensible. We just don't know why. And it's just a gift.

Some time ago, Frank was spending time in Arizona when he experienced some pain in his abdomen. At first, he thought it was an upset stomach, but the pain persisted. In fact, it got worse and worse. Late one evening, he found himself in an emergency room in Phoenix.

Oh gosh, what an awful place. It really made me think about Dante's Inferno. out with these paintings of suffering people. There were people in all different kinds of distress. It was very, very slow. And I was in pain the whole time also.

As it turned out, Frank's gallbladder needed to be removed. He would need an operation.

The thing that helped me a lot there was actually thinking about the kinds of themes that we've been talking about, that The world really is a beautiful place. We can understand it. It's enormous. And my problems loom very, very small in the big picture.

I mean, and in some ways, do you try and carry that through with you, not just when you are in an emergency room in Phoenix, but through your daily life, Frank? Do you try and sort of keep the world in perspective? Oh, yes.

All the time. I know, I realize that I can rely on that as a source of solace and perspective and calm in distressing circumstances.

Frank Wilczek is a theoretical physicist and mathematician at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He won the Nobel Prize in 2004 for his work on quantum chromodynamics, a theory that explains the inner workings of very tiny particles. Frank, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

Thank you. It's been fun.

When someone sees the world as beautiful, it's easy to shrug off their perspective. We say they're naive or shallow or that they're looking at reality through rose-tinted glasses. But Frank and many other scientists offer an intriguing counterargument: the universe itself is rose-tinted. The poet John Keats may have been onto something when he wrote, beauty is truth, truth beauty. That's all you know on Earth and all you need to know.

Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media.

Our audio production team includes Bridget McCarthy, Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Querelle, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. Our unsung heroes today are Derek Blackburn of Quiet House Recording and Daniel Fox of Wondersmith Audio. Derek and Daniel are audio engineers and they were incredibly generous with their time and knowledge as we were setting up interviews for this episode. Thanks to you both for your help, Derek and Daniel. Next week, we continue our look at beauty and why we're so drawn to it. We'll explore the conclusions we draw about people based on their appearance and how those assumptions impact our lives.

I mean, it really says a lot about how these impressions that we make about another person based on, you know, appearance have profound consequences, even if those impressions are not right.

I'm Shankar Vedantam.

See you soon.

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