2012 : WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE DEEP, ELEGANT, OR BEAUTIFUL EXPLANATION?
Editor-in-Chief of Nature since 1995; Beginning summer 2018, he will become Editor-in-Chief of Springer Nature’s portfolio of journals, books and magazines
The Beauty In A Sunrise
This year's Edge Question is about one's personal responses to explanation. When I was first excited by physics, the depths of its explanations were compelling to me in very esoteric contexts. For example, the binding of matter, energy and space-time in General Relativity seemed (and indeed is) an extraordinarily elegant and deep explanation.
Nowadays I am even more compelled by powerful explanations that lie behind the things we see around us that are too easily taken for granted. And in thinking about the Question, I find myself drawn to a context that is experienced every day by just about everybody.
How generous is that himself the sun
—arriving truly, faithfully who goes
(never for a moment ceasing to begin
the mystery of day for someone's eyes)
Thus wrote ee cummings in the opening of his short but lyrical celebration of our star. Those words highlight a daily moment—a sunrise—whose associated human sense of (in)significance and mystery may for some be only deepened by appreciating (at least) three great explanations underlying within the experience. And each of those explanations has at least one of the qualities of depth, elegance and beauty.
If you care about such things, and (like me) live at a northern middle latitude, you will know the range of the horizon visible from your home, between (roughly) south-east and north-east, across which the point of sunrise shifts back and forth over the year, with sunrise getting later as it moves northward and the days shorten, and the motion reversing at the winter solstice. And beyond that quite complex behaviour is the simple truth of the sun's fidelity—we can indeed trust it to come up somewhere in the East every morning.
Like a great work of art, a great scientific explanation loses none of its power to inspire awe afresh whenever one contemplates it. So it is with the explanation that those daily and annual cycles of sunrises are explicable by a tilted rotating Earth orbiting the Sun, whose average axial direction can be considered fixed relative to the stars thanks to a still-mysterious conservation law.
Unlike my two other chosen explanations, this one encountered scepticism from scientists for decades. The heliocentric view of the solar system, articulated by Copernicus in the mid 16th century, was not widely accepted until well into the 17th century. For me, that triumph over the combination of scientific scepticism and religious hostility only adds to the explanation's appeal.
Another explanation is certainly elegant and lies behind the changing hues of the sky as the sun rises. Lord Rayleigh succeeded James Clerk Maxwell as Cavendish professor of physics at Cambridge. One of his early achievements was to deduce laws of the scattering of light. His first effort reached the right answer on an invalid foundation – the scattering of light in an elastic aether. Although the existence of such an aether wasn't shown to be a fallacy until some years later, he redid his calculations using Maxwell's deeply unifying theories of electromagnetism. 'Rayleigh scattering' is the expression of those theories in contexts where an electromagnetic wave encounters electrically polarised particles much smaller than its wavelength. The amount of scattering, Rayleigh discovered, is inversely proportional to the fourth power of the wavelength. By 1899, he had shown that air molecules themselves were powerful scatterers.
There, in one bound, is the essential explanation of why the sky is blue and why sunrises are reddened. Blue light is scattered much more by air molecules than light of longer wavelengths. The sun's disk is accordingly reddened and all the more so when seen through the long atmospheric path at sunrise and sunset. (To fully account for the effect, you also need to take into account the sun's spectrum and the visual responses of human eyes.) The pink clouds that can add so much to the beauty of a sunrise consist of comparatively large droplets that scatter the wavelengths of reddened sunlight more equally than air molecules—colourwise, what you see is what they get.
The third explanation behind a sunrise is conceptually and cosmologically the deepest. What is happening in the sun to generate its seemingly eternal light and heat? Understanding the nuclear reactions at the sun's core was just a part of an explanation that (thanks especially to Burbidge, Burbidge, Fowler and Hoyle in 1957) simultaneously allowed us to understand not only the light from many kinds of stars but also how almost all the naturally occurring chemical elements are produced throughout the universe: in chains of reactions occurring within stable and cataclysmically unstable cosmic balls of gas in their various stages of stellar evolution, driven by the shifting influences of all the fundamental forces of nature—gravity, electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces.
Edge readers know that scientific understanding enhances rather than destroys nature's beauty. All of these explanations for me contribute to the beauty in a sunrise.
Ah, but what is the explanation of beauty? Brain scientists grapple with nuclear-magnetic resonance images—a recent meta-analysis indicated that all of our aesthetic judgements seem to include the use of neural circuits in the right anterior insula, an area of the cerebral cortex typically associated with visceral perception. Perhaps our sense of beauty is a by-product of the evolutionary maintenance of the senses of belonging and of disgust. For what it's worth, as exoplanets pour out of our telescopes, I believe that we will encounter astrochemical evidence for some form of extraterrestrial organism well before we achieve a deep, elegant or beautiful explanation of human aesthetics.
