• Dr. Mortimer J. Adler: Beauty: Syntopicon essay

• Beauty in math & science

The Orion Nebula, clouds of diffuse gas and dust, is a hotbed of star formation; about 1,500 light-years away, loaded with hydrogen gas, it is aglow with fiery stellar radiation. Photo by David Douglas.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: "Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not."

Elizabeth Kubler-Ross: "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 from within."

The so-called Lynx arc is 1 million times brighter than the well-known Orion Nebula. It is the biggest, brightest and hottest star-forming region ever seen in space, 12 billion light-years from Earth.

Daniel Boorstin, Living Philosophies: "I share Einstein's belief that there is nothing more beautiful than the mystery of things."

John Keats (1795-1821): "Beauty is truth, truth beauty; that is all ye know on Earth, and all ye need to know."

Helen Keller: "The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart."

NGC 6397, a packed-tight globular cluster, sits 8,200 light-years from Earth, within the Milky Way. Astronomers have discovered what they think are the remains of colliding stars. Stars near the center of NGC 6397 are only a few light-weeks apart. Collisions probably occur about one every few million years or so.

Eleanor Roosevelt: "The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams."

Joseph Addison: "There is nothing that makes its way more directly to the soul than beauty."

Confucius: "Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it."

Emerson: "We fly to beauty as an asylum from the terrors of finite nature."

John Ruskin: "Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless: peacocks and lilies, for instance."

Albert Einstein: "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."

This is an image of MyCn18, a young planetary nebula located about 8,000 light-years away, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). This Hubble image reveals the true shape of MyCn18 to be an hourglass with an intricate pattern of "etchings" in its walls. The results are of great interest because they shed new light on the poorly understood ejection of stellar matter which accompanies the slow death of Sun-like stars.

Albert Einstein: "The ideals which have lighted my way, and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Kindness, Beauty, and Truth."

Michaelangelo: "Beauty is the purgation of superfluities."

William Shakespeare: "To me, fair friend, you never can be old For as you were when first your eye I eyed, Such seems your beauty still."

Edward C. Randall, the Buffalo attorney who, for 22 years, worked with medium Emily French and received thousands of direct-voice communications from the Spirit World. "There is nothing in the great scheme of nature that, when understood, is not simple, harmonious, and beautiful." 

Why is it that Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman felt an enchantment that would last for a lifetime when he heard his high-school physics teacher say: Light always follows the path of the beautiful?
               

                                                   Hyatt Carter