The Accelerating Universe
Infinite Expansion, the Cosmological Constant, and the Beauty of the Cosmos
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
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