The Feynman Series, Beauty: Does Science Ruin a Flower?

There are two kinds of people at a table when someone brings flowers. The first kind says “how lovely” and puts them in water. The second kind says “how lovely,” and then, about ten seconds later, “did you know bees can see ultraviolet?” I am the second kind. My family has made peace with this. Mostly.

For a long time I privately suspected the first kind was right. That there is something a little rude about it. You were handed a flower, not a lab report. Then I watched a short video called Beauty. Feynman isn't even in it, not really. Only his voice, slightly annoyed at a friend, laid over sea ice drifting under black cliffs and the kind of slow, enormous nature footage that usually comes with a hushed British narrator. Here the narrator is a physicist from Queens. I haven't apologized since.

The voice comes from The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, a 1981 BBC Horizon film by Christopher Sykes, where Feynman simply sits in a chair and talks. Around 2011 Reid Gower, who had already done the same thing with Carl Sagan in The Sagan Series, took a few minutes of that interview, cut it to music, laid it over nature footage and called it “Beauty.” The flower passage on its own has its own life as Feynman's Ode to a Flower. The story is simple. Feynman has a friend who is an artist. The friend holds up a flower and says, look how beautiful it is. Feynman agrees. Then comes the knife: I, as an artist, can see the beauty, but you, as a scientist, take it all apart and it becomes a dull thing.

Feynman's verdict is delivered with the restraint of a man who has had this argument before: “I think that he's kind of nutty.”

The friend is usually identified as Jirayr Zorthian, a painter who lived up the hill in Altadena, not far from Caltech. The two of them argued about art and science at parties for years, then made a trade: Feynman would teach Zorthian physics, Zorthian would teach Feynman to draw. Feynman tells the whole story in the chapter “But Is It Art?” of Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! The physics lessons went nowhere. The drawing lessons stuck. Feynman kept drawing for the rest of his life and even sold a few pieces, signed “Ofey” so nobody would buy them for the name.

Feynman's answer has two moves, and the first one is very polite. The beauty the artist sees, he says, is available to everybody, including him. He might be a little less refined about it, he admits, but he can look at a flower and enjoy it. Nobody took that away.

The second move is the one that matters. He sees more. He can imagine the cells inside. The complicated machinery going on in there, which has its own beauty. Beauty is not only at the scale of one centimeter,¹ he says. There is beauty at smaller dimensions too. Go ahead and check:

That last step is my favorite fact about flowers, and I've been saving it for a dinner party for years. The yellow of the petal is decided by how far an electron can wander along a chain of carbon atoms. A longer chain means a redder colour. It is the “particle in a box” problem every physics student meets sooner or later, wearing a petal. It is also why the tomatoes in my garden turn red: lycopene, a close cousin of β-carotene without the rings at the ends.

The squirrel that eats my tomatoes knows none of this and enjoys them anyway. Feynman would say the squirrel is the artist friend. I would say the squirrel is a thief. We are both right.

It only adds. I don't understand how it subtracts.

Richard Feynman, 1981

Then Feynman does something I love. In the middle of defending science he gets distracted by a better question. The colours of a flower evolved to attract insects, he says, so that the insects will pollinate it. Which means insects can see colour. Which raises the question: does this aesthetic sense exist in the “lower forms”? And why is it aesthetic at all?

Part of that has an answer. In 1914 Karl von Frisch trained honeybees to find sugar water on a blue card and then hid the blue card among grey ones of every shade. The bees went straight to the blue. They see colour. But not our colours: a honeybee has three kinds of colour receptor, tuned to ultraviolet, blue and green. It is nearly blind to red and sees a whole band of light we don't. A lot of flowers that look plain to us are painted for bees in ultraviolet. The black-eyed Susan is the classic case.

The rest of the flower turns out to be built for the visitor too. Those cone-shaped cells on the petal surface give bees a grip, and in experiments bees work harder on flat-celled petals and prefer the cones. Some petals carry rows of nanoscale ridges that throw a faint blue and ultraviolet halo only a bee would really notice. Bumblebees can even sense the weak electric field around a flower and tell which ones were visited a moment ago. The flower is a billboard, a handrail and a receipt.

And Feynman's bigger question, the one about aesthetics? In 2004 a team led by Martin Giurfa offered bumblebees that had never seen a flower a choice of artificial ones. The bees preferred the symmetrical patterns, with no training at all. The paper is called “Symmetry is in the eye of the ‘beeholder’.” Scientists are allowed one joke per decade and they used it well.

This is the exact opposite of what the artist friend was afraid of. Knowing about the bee didn't make the flower duller. It made the flower stranger. There is a whole picture on those petals that I will never see, painted for somebody else, and I only know it is there because people took the thing apart. If you want more of this, I wrote about the best books about bees, and the sunflower spirals at the centre of the flower are their own story in The Beauty of Numbers in Nature. Ernst Haeckel spent a career proving the same point with a paintbrush, in The Art and Science of Ernst Haeckel.

Then the voice turns, quite suddenly, from flowers to something much bigger. If you expected science to answer all the wonderful questions, Feynman says (what we are, where we are going, what the meaning of the universe is), you could easily end up disappointed and go shopping for a mystical answer instead. He doesn't. His way out is to not need the answer.

He goes on: it is more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that might be wrong. He has approximate answers, possible beliefs, different degrees of certainty about different things, and he isn't absolutely sure of anything. Being lost in a mysterious universe, possibly without any purpose, doesn't frighten him.

I'm in my forties. I have kids, a garden, a car whose air conditioning I fixed myself (I'll be mentioning this for years), and a long list of things I'm sure about that later turned out to be wrong. “Different degrees of certainty” is the most grown-up phrase in the whole video. So I tried it. Here is my ledger:

Notice that writing it down didn't make anything scarier. The last row is a question mark and the world is still turning. That is the trick, I think. You don't have to fill in every bar. You just have to be honest about how full each one is.

Near the end, Feynman mentions his father almost in passing: the scientific view, “my father's view,” that we should look to see what is true and what may not be. Melville Feynman sold uniforms for a living and never studied science, but he walked his son through the Catskills and taught him the difference between knowing the name of a bird and knowing something about the bird. You can learn its name in every language, he said, and still know absolutely nothing about it. Everything Richard did afterwards, from the Feynman Technique to his fury at the way schools taught maths, is that walk in the woods wearing a lab coat.

Then he turns to religion, carefully. The special stories about our relationship to the universe, he says, seem to him too simple, too local, too provincial for a universe that big. It isn't in proportion. He immediately adds that he can't argue it and isn't trying to. He's just describing what doubt does: doubting and asking is a fundamental part of his soul, and once you start doubting and asking, it gets a little harder to believe. You don't have to agree with him. I am not refereeing that one. But notice the shape of it. It's the same move as the flower. He isn't taking anything away. He's just refusing to stop looking.

The artist friend was afraid that knowing would make things smaller. The flower would turn into a diagram and the diagram would be dull. But look at the man who said “it only adds.” This is the same Feynman who, after his wife Arline died, wrote her one of the most tender letters ever written by a physicist and never mailed. Science didn't make him feel less. It gave him more things to feel about.

There are black-eyed Susans along the roads here every summer. I used to just see yellow. Now I see yellow, and a bullseye I can't see, and a chain of carbon swallowing blue light, and a bee that maybe, possibly, likes the symmetry. It is a lot of flower. It's more than I was handed.