Chapter One
Beauty and the Beast
What is beauty? What is it that makes certain works of art, pieces of music, landscapes, or the face of a person so appealing to us that they give us an enormous sense of excitement and pleasure? This question, with which many philosophers, writers, psychologists, artists, and biologists have struggled at least since the time of Plato, and which led (among other things) to the birth of the notion of aesthetics in the eighteenth century, is still largely unanswered. To some extent, all of the classical approaches to beauty can be summarized by the following (clearly oversimplified) statement: Beauty symbolizes a degree of perfection with respect to some ideal. It is strange, though, that something which has such an abstract definition can cause such intense reactions. For example, some accounts claim that the Russian writer Dostoyevsky sometimes fainted in the presence of a particularly be ... read full excerpt from The Accelerating Universe: Infinite Expansion, the Cosmological Constant, and the Beauty of the Cosmos ebook
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