'To a toad, what is beauty? A female with two pop-eyes, a wide mouth,
yellow belly and spotted back'
~ Voltaire.

People are like stained glass windows: they sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light within.
~ Elizabeth Kubler-Ross

One frequently only finds out how really beautiful a really beautiful woman is after considerable acquaintance with her; and the rule applies to Niagara Falls, to majestic mountains, and to mosques- especially to mosques
~ Mark Twain

Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.
~ Ralph Ellison

As we pick our way carefully around and through this subject, we shall be talking about standards of beauty, proportions, architecture, design, beauty to a scientist, cultural matters, mathematical beauty, female conditioning, symmetry and a range of other topics. It is certainly not going to be possible to talk about beauty without at least mentioning the question of physical attractiveness. We shall quite happily bypass ­ for now at least - an exhibition in London. It has to do with beauty and Horror, no less. But since this magazine is devoted to The Whole Shebang ­ the entire, big picture - it is worth remembering how much those reputedly soulless people, those scientists, have talked about beauty, and especially about beauty in Nature.

If a poet, an artist, or a lover sees beauty in a rainbow, then bully for them. It has been rightly said that the surface beauty of the rainbow can be appreciated by all of us. But that buried beauty, uncovered by the study and the research of the physicist, is understood only by the scientifically literate. It is acquired.

The problem with this sort of discussion, though, is that one can be swayed this way and that by the arguments. Yes, it is a fine, fine thing to have an appreciation of deep beauty. It's also hard to argue with Jean Kerr when she declares, ‘I'm tired of all this nonsense about beauty being only skin-deep. That's deep enough. What do you want, an adorable pancreas?’

Aesthetic philosophers all too often get bogged down in their attempts to analyse a quality which somehow escapes analysis; and it's perhaps strange that scant respect has been by the aesthetic thinkers to Kant, who agreed with Shakespeare that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, adding that it was in the heart of the onlooker, too.

Who so much as knows what beauty is?

You may take it to be: such combined perfection of form and charm of colouring as affords keen pleasure to the sense of sight. Of course, as we have already suggested, the notion of beauty can be dependent upon prevailing fashions or standards, however much we may wish it to be timeless, and the term can also be applied simply to an exceptionally good specimen of something, whether that something be an aardvark, a goal in football, or a kumquat. However, beauty is much else besides. Another, relevant way of talking about beauty is to call it that quality or combination of qualities which charms the intellectual or moral faculties, through inherent grace or fitness to a desire end.

Werner Heisenberg, the physicist, was described in the last issue of Shebang - by someone who knew him - as having been rather insensitive as a man. And yet even he was capable of writing to Albert Einstein, 'You may object that by speaking of simplicity and beauty I am introducing aesthetic criteria of truth, and I frankly admit that I am strongly attracted by the simplicity and beauty of the mathematical schemes which nature presents us. You must have felt this too: the almost frightening simplicity and wholeness of the relationship, which nature suddenly spreads out before us.’

Einstein himself was fond of saying, ‘The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives’.

We are indeed children in the sense that we know so little; but we are also right to be filled with wonder - the kind of wonder at the beauty of forms and everlasting truths presented to mathematicians, the best of whom always remark upon it. The universe of ideas, the order, the harmonious connections, the very structure and scheme of creation always evoke a deep appreciation by perceptive mathematicians and scientists. Bertrand Russell said mathematics possessed supreme beauty, but ‘a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture'. Aristotle said that the mathematical sciences exhibited the greatest forms of the beautiful. Of all mathematicians, though, Poincaré should have the last word: 'If nature were not beautiful, it would not be worth knowing, and if nature were not worth knowing, life would not be worth living'.