Brandon Vaidyanathan | Beauty in Science

Vaidyanathan:

Understanding is an aesthetic experience. It is a type of beauty. It is a kind of harmony. It’s really like listening to a symphony or something like that, that is an experience that moves us. It makes it worthwhile for us to do what we do. And so we want to say that science is no different from music or poetry in being that aesthetic quest that really are seeking that coming together of our inquiry into the world and then the world’s self-disclosure to us. And when those come together with a correspondence, then that is beauty just like it is in music.

I’m Brandon Vaidyanathan. I work as Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Sociology at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.

Stump:

Welcome to Language of God, I’m Jim Stump. Beauty probably isn’t the thing you expect to hear scientists talking a lot about when you imagine them in their sterile labs pouring over pages of numerical data. But it turns out that beauty is an important part of why a lot of scientists do the work they do, slog through long post-docs, deal with the constant grant cycles and pressure to publish and keep coming back to their work. Brandon Vaidyanathan has been studying what exactly scientists think about beauty, and that’s a lot of what we talk about here. But we always like to learn a little bit of the story of our guests too and understand better where they come from. And maybe that’s even more appropriate when interviewing a sociologist.

In that vein, we asked Brandon to tell us about his conversion to Christianity. The story he tells involves a clandestine relationship in a Catholic youth retreat in Dubai and is pretty interesting to hear. It was fun talking to Brandon and I hope everyone who listens will leave with a sharper eye toward beauty in their own work. Let’s get to the conversation.

Stump:

Well, Brandon Vaidyanathan, welcome to the podcast.

Vaidyanathan:

Thank you. Good to be here.

Stump:

Well, I’m excited to talk to you about beauty, but first let’s get to know you a little bit. And in doing this, I like to go way back. So where’d you grow up? What was your family like?

Vaidyanathan:

I grew up in the Middle East in the Arabia Gulf. I was born in Qatar. I spent most of my childhood in Oman, which is a quiet country on the Arabia Gulf that not many people talk about. It’s never in the news.

Stump:

It’s often in the New York Times crossword puzzles though.

Vaidyanathan:

Right, right. That’s right. I grew up in Oman for most of my childhood. My parents are from India. They moved to the Arabia Gulf for work before I was born, and they stayed there for a number of years. They left in about 2012 to go back to India where they live now. And my childhood was spent mostly between Oman and a little bit of India. And I was in the United Emirates for four years as well for high school and my first year of college actually as well. That’s where I grew up.

Stump:

When did you come to the US then?

Vaidyanathan:

I moved to the US in 2007. I was in Canada before that for about eight years or so.

Stump:

Okay. So you’re a sociologist. What were the first hints, at least in retrospect, that you’d become attracted to this discipline of sociology when you were growing up? Is there anything there?

Vaidyanathan:

Oh man. Just growing up in different countries, cities, we grew up, myself and my friends growing up in the Arabian Gulf, were in a private Indian school. Essentially the important thing to know about a lot of these Arabian Gulf countries is they’re predominantly inhabited by people from the Indian subcontinent. So a lot of guest workers. It’s probably the most prominent in the UAE, where about 95% of the workforce there is guest workers in the city of Dubai, for instance. And half of that population is from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh. So Oman is a lot less, there are more locals there. But we still, while growing up I went to an Indian school and I was surrounded by people from the Indian subcontinent and from different parts of India. And I didn’t know anybody actually from my own region of the country, which is Tamil Nadu, it’s a state in the south of India.

And I didn’t know any other Tamil kids and it was Gujaratis and Goins and Bengalis and people from all over the country. And so that was a very cosmopolitan education that I had and the community that I was with. I was very attuned early on even growing up in the Arabian Gulf to the fact that we were outsiders, we were foreigners, and there was these dynamics of migration and the sense of we don’t belong here. And you can never really become a citizen in some of those countries. So even if you’re born there, you don’t get citizenship. It’s not a birthright model. I was very attuned to those questions of belonging, of culture, of differences between cultures, religions, communities, ethnicities and so on. And so I think those were probably the early seeds. I didn’t know of any such thing called sociology until I started my second year of college I think in Canada.

That was the first time I came across it. And even then I wasn’t particularly interested in it until when I was into my master’s program. I did an undergrad degree in business, and that was really, I started out in computer science like many Indians who come to North America. That’s what I thought I was going to be, a computer programmer. And that happened just on the heels of my conversion to Catholicism. I grew up Hindu and then I became essentially an atheist agnostic. I don’t know what I would consider myself. And then after my conversion I moved to Canada and I found that I was no longer interested in machines. I wanted to understand people. And the closest thing I could get into that I guess allowed me to retain my course credits was a business degree and it allowed me to do a lot of things in psychology and sociology.

I really wanted to do philosophy and theology, but my dad would never pay for that. So this was an eclectic enough discipline that allowed me to do whatever I wanted.

Stump:

Nice.

Vaidyanathan:

And then I did a master’s degree also in business because that was the only thing that somebody would be willing to give me a scholarship for. I ended up doing a lot of sociological research. I didn’t know that’s what it was at the time, but I had my mentors, my professors there were anthropologists and sociologists, and they really encouraged me to do the kind of research that I’ve been doing ever since then. At that time I was looking in my master’s work at the phenomenon of global call centers as this just erupted in the early 2000s and you have people in India who are answering phones for IBM and Dell and working throughout the night, sleeping during the day. And I wanted to understand, well, how did they do this and what does this do to them? And that kind of research I realized was essentially sociology. And so I ended up pursuing a doctorate in that field.

Stump:

Let me go back to you saying you converted to Catholicism. I read on your introductory page that happened in Dubai at the age of 18 from Tamil Nadu. There is a bit of a Catholic presence there in the south, but you said your family was Hindu growing up.

Vaidyanathan:

Yep, yep. Tamil Nadu.

Stump:

Can you tell us about the conversion? How does this happen?

Vaidyanathan:

It’s a long story. I’ll try to give you a really short version. But I essentially fell in love with a girl and that’s how it started. It was in Dubai. It was a very clandestine relationship since we were not allowed to be dating. We were in our last year of high school and she was Catholic from a part of India that was colonized by the Portuguese and she was of Portuguese lineage. And I was from a very different cultural background, so we would never have been allowed to go out. But we were also in this country where you really shouldn’t be together with a person of the opposite sex who’s not married to you or a sibling or something like that in public. We had a very unhealthy relationship for a year, that was very secretive, nobody knew about it.

Stump:

Oh dear.

Vaidyanathan:

Essentially it was a very messy relationship. And then suddenly a year into the relationship, this girl announced to me on the phone one day that she had been seeing somebody else on the side for the last three months and wanted my permission to go out with this guy while I continued on as her best friend, which is the most absurd proposal I could have ever imagined. I didn’t see it coming, I wasn’t clued into any tensions in our relationship. But I said, hell no, it’s him or me, what’s wrong with you? And then I found out the two of them were going to a Catholic retreat. It was the first youth retreat in Dubai and I thought I would be a nuisance. And I followed them to this retreat in order to do an exposé of the religious BS that I thought they were up to.

And something dislodged my intentions there. I found myself telling her at the end of this retreat, and remember she was asking for my permission, she still wasn’t going out with this guy. I found myself telling her that, yeah, this is fine. And it was a very strange experience because I felt that I had somehow touched a part of myself that didn’t care about my rights, how dare you after all that I’ve done for you and that sort of thing that I was telling her. There was a part of me that just somehow was deeper than that and simply wanted to be free and wanted her to be free. I just simply wanted to love, and it was a very strange experience. She found it bewildering, but she went off with this guy and then they were together for a couple of weeks and then at the end of those couple of weeks she told me you’re not the same person anymore. I don’t know what’s happened to you, but this guy’s really boring. Let’s get back together.

It was a very odd thing. And at this point my other friends told me, now you can stick it to her and I can show her what it feels like. But I had no desire for vengeance. It was just this very odd experience of, I felt that by accompanying her in this relationship with her new boyfriend I was actually loving her for the first time as opposed to just wanting to use her. But it also changed another thing, which was my household was very, I guess a very unwelcome place. Because I had made it so, because I had a lot of anger against my parents. My mother is severely mentally ill. She had developed schizophrenia, had psychotic episodes when I was about eight years old, and she used to be a medical professional and she had to quit her job and stuff.

I was angry at her about what had happened to her. And she was not treated for many, many years, because of the stigma and my dad’s unfamiliarity with her condition. So anyway, I had a lot of anger against my parents, against whatever I thought God was or whatever powers ruled the universe. And so some of that changed very quickly. My anger towards my parents disappeared pretty quickly. And then as I spent time, now that I had this girl back, I essentially spent time with the people that I met at that retreat, the other youth, and we had a youth group. And as I spent time with them I came to learn about the Christian gospel and the story of God who is a father who loves unconditionally, which is a very peculiar idea that would not have made sense to me prior to that experience, because for me love was very conditional. You were worth loving if you were faithful and if you’re good and so on. But then I’d tasted something that was different and so I could resonate with that. And then the proof of this love was a naked man on the cross, betrayed by his friends, which I could also resonate with for the first time. And the strangeness of the gospel and the story of the resurrection where you have Jesus returning from the dead and he doesn’t punch Peter in the face and say, you bastard, you left me hanging there. There’s no vengeance in that experience. And that was something like what I had tasted as well. So there was a deep resonance with this story that would never have made sense to me before. It was just like any other fable, I was very much a scientific materialist and found myself very surprised by this correspondence between my experience and the story.

I went to talk to the leader of this youth group and said, maybe I’m thinking about, I might marry this girl, so maybe I might want to get baptized. I don’t know what that is. And he just asked me, well, who is Jesus to you? And I said, I don’t know. I mumbled something. I had no idea. And he said, look, Jesus is a real person, is someone you can speak to and you can have a relationship with. And evidently something’s happened in your life, so you should develop this relationship. I told him, look man, I don’t talk to invisible people. It’s something my mom does. I’m not mentally ill. So he said, well, why don’t you take a notebook and write a letter as though you are writing to a friend. And so that very evening I picked up a notebook and I began to essentially have these conversations with this presence that started to make itself known to me in some strange way, which was also very unsettling, that I felt that all of my questions and my anguish somehow had some response in a presence.

I spent a lot of time with this guy who was the leader of that youth group. He went on to become a Catholic priest many years later. But at that time he had a job where he had a lot of free time where we would just sit and eat pizzas or shawarmas in downtown Dubai and talk theology and C. S. Lewis and St. Augustine and so on. And a lot of the answers that he offered to my questions made a lot of sense to me. And so that was essentially the beginning of my conviction that this thing, whatever this thing was in the world that was being lived out by these people in this community, was something that I belonged to. And that this presence that I experienced was the same. God made flesh that they worshiped. And so all of this happened very quickly between that initial breakup with the girl and my baptism confirmation and so on. It was just nine months. It was really quick.

And then I didn’t really have much of a sense of what I was doing other than the fact that there’s something true here. And I think I would say that I belong to this. And for me, the most important thing it gave to me was an answer to a deep question that I had been struggling with for years, which is, where does my mother’s worth come from? And even my own sense of self-worth, because if my self-worth can’t come from this girl who the very next day could leave me for somebody else, then where does it come from? Is it simply contingent on what other people think of me? And similarly do my parents and my mother in particular as someone who in my mind had lost everything that was valuable. For me, the mind was the most important thing. And without that, what are you? And she was a shell of the person that I knew her to be and why does she have any value or the people that I saw on the streets in India?

I had these deep questions that I didn’t think the Hinduism of my childhood could answer other than through a cruel, and again I wasn’t a scholar of Hinduism. My understanding of popular Hinduism was, well, they must have done something in their past lives and therefore they’re being punished for it. That was really unsatisfying and was part of the reason why I think I rejected religion. And now I had an answer to this question of worth and dignity, which was the source of this worth, is this person who has given his life for you and has called you into being and redeems you. So that for me was I think the heart of the experience. And since then it’s just been a journey of discovering more.

Stump:

Well, that is quite the story, Brandon, and one that has taken us into some areas that we don’t very often get into on this podcast. But to be fair we don’t often get into talking about sociology on this podcast either. Let me ask you about the relationship between your faith and sociology, because in my estimation at least, sociology tends to pride itself on reporting and analyzing data very objectively. But I wonder if you see your Catholic faith as influencing your work at all.

Vaidyanathan:

I think in a number of ways. I think that sense of objectivity actually has gone by the wayside lately. I think there used to be an ideal of some value-free sociology that people like Max Weber had put forward. And sociologists today tend to be activists. They’re more committed to changing the world, and it is more of a Marxian influence on belittling the value of understanding and emphasizing change in transformation. And usually, at least in North American sociology, it tends to be more from a politically progressive standpoint. And there’s some good to that, and I think there’s some merit to that kind of work. I think my own approach to sociology is actually much more of that Bavarian kind, where I don’t think that strict value neutrality is possible, but I do think we can prize objectivity to some degree and really try to understand how social reality works.

And so that understanding for me is really important. There’s a saying, I can’t remember who is the source of this quotation, but it goes something like it. It’s important to love the truth more than your own opinion. And that for me I think has been what has driven a lot of my work, is trying to understand social reality as something that is just as objective as physical reality. And the way, the mechanisms, the causal mechanisms that operate in the social world, the properties of social structures, all those things they’re durable, they’re objective, they’re real, and we need to understand how that works. We may have theories that can give us some traction on that, but we shouldn’t be completely wedded to one account over another. I think there’s that love for truth that comes from my faith that prioritizes that.

And also I’ve learned really from sociology actually, there’s actually an influence in the other direction, which I think has helped my faith because I think there is this prioritization of the poor and the marginalized and the vulnerable in a number of ways, at least in a lot of sociology that’s done recently that tries to understand social inequality and so forth. I’m not naturally inclined towards something like social justice. I think I grew up very conditioned to succeed and stamp on people’s necks and climb the ladder. And so it’s been a corrective and it’s been very helpful to try and think about justice and what is justice and think about the condition of people who are really suffering.

And a lot of sociological work that at least that I’m drawn to is work that particularly ethnographic work that sheds light on the experiences of people living in poverty or people who are victims of say, bonded labor or people in the prison system and looking at mass incarceration and those sorts of phenomena. So trying to understand that kind of experience. It’s not really the focus of my research, but a lot of my teaching is in that area. And for me, that’s really one of the things that I find valuable about sociology. But my own approach has been much more of this objective route.

Stump:

So how did you get interested in beauty?

Vaidyanathan:

Well, I think the very first question I had about beauty emerged when I was in a course on studying social movements, actually it was looking at protest movements and revolutions and things of that sort, in grad school. And it struck me that at that time the emphasis and the literature was on how moral outrage is one of the key mechanisms that fuels social movements. And it seemed to me that there has to be a flip side to this outrage, which is it has to assume some vision of the beautiful. There has to be some ideal that is compelling enough to make one want to sacrifice their lives in pursuit of justice. And what is that beautiful ideal? And it’s seldom mentioned in the sociological literature, but I found a lot of evidence for it in reading, say the speeches of Martin Luther King or the diaries of Gandhi and Dorothy Day and so on.

And I saw very clear connections between beauty and justice. And I came across the work of a philosopher, Elaine Scarry, at Harvard, who talks about beauty and justice. So that for me was the initial interest in this question. And then a few years later I was studying scientists and talking to scientists about their work, and this is a project where we were looking at the role of religion and science with Elaine Howard Ecklund and a few other colleagues. We did these interviews, 600 and something interviews with scientists in eight countries. And we were asking them about, they were telling us all these sacrifices they made for their work, that they’d given up lucrative jobs in industry and they were sacrificing their health and their careers and so on.

And we’d ask them, well, why do you do it? And many of them would say, because it’s beautiful. And that was very striking. It was totally unexpected. It was not a criterion of worth that I imagined scientists would use. And it kept coming up so much that I really wanted to know what this meant. And so I ended up with the help of Templeton Religion Trust pursuing what became a five-year project, trying to figure out how do you measure a beauty in science and what does it do, what role does it play in the practice of science? How does it help or influence the wellbeing of scientists?

Stump:

I would assume somewhere in that project you have to come up with some kind of a working definition of sorts, don’t you? Or is beauty just this basic fundamental concept? We can’t really clarify with other terms, you either know it or you don’t know it.

Vaidyanathan:

Well, when we started out it was really open-ended, because I didn’t want to impose any definition on, I genuinely was curious as to what they meant by it. And so we collected a lot of interview data and we kept getting the same sorts of themes over and over. We’d have physicists talking a lot about symmetry and elegance of equations and so forth. We’d have biologists talking a lot about maybe the elegance of experiments or pretty colors under the slides or the way they would prepare their photographs in submissions to journal articles and so on. We’d get some criteria that overlap significantly. And we came up with about a list of 10 different aesthetic properties, and we didn’t really find very much that layout outside those criteria to symmetry, simplicity, elegance, harmony, a sense of hidden order, the inner logic of systems, sometimes asymmetry and visual.

Stump:

So it’s not like this is a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for beauty. Right? Are these just other pointers, or are you genuinely trying to reduce this concept of beauty to other more fundamental terms that are more easily distinguished or understandable?

Vaidyanathan:

Yeah. I want to know when they use the word beauty, what do they mean? And they can mean, and we find in our research that scientists anyway, mean typically one of three kinds of things. One could be sensory beauty, and so that could be these visual aspects, so pretty colors under the microscope or something like that. There could be useful beauty, that is beauty that is seen as a guide to truth. And so an elegant equation, many physicists think is much more likely to be true than one that is not. And the third thing is the beauty of understanding. So that is the pleasure you gain from a sense of things fitting together, the clarity of a new insight when you understand how reality works, this is how things are. It is reality in some sense revealing itself to you, or at least you’re perceiving that, right? So you could be wrong, your insight could be mistaken, but those are three distinct kinds of experiences.

Stump:

Those do sound very distinct to me, and yet the same word somehow covers all of them.

Vaidyanathan:

Exactly. It’s the same word that they typically use, and they’re all essentially aesthetic experiences, and they’re all like, we want to say, types of beauty.

Stump:

So let me ask you a little further about the second one there, because it’s the physicist, Paul Dirac, who famously said it’s more important to have beauty in one’s equations than to have them fit experiments. I think that’s sometimes taken out a context. He wasn’t saying that fit to experiment doesn’t matter, just that that’s looser and more prone to errors, and that might be refined down the road, but if your equations are ugly, then you’re on the wrong track altogether. That seems like a really deep commitment to beauty being a genuine feature of reality that can be discovered and modeled somehow.

Vaidyanathan:

Some people really think that. Again, I’m not a philosopher of science nor a philosopher of aesthetics. So all we did was we asked scientists in our surveys, what do you think of this? We gave them these statements from people like Dirac. And this particular claim we found that we initially, our pilot testing, we asked of both physicists and biologists. So we only are studying only those two disciplines, physics and biology. The biologist laughed and said, you can’t ask us that question. That’s insane. Don’t put it on your survey. So we only asked it to physicists and something like 77% of physicists strongly disagreed with that statement. They’re like, that’s crazy.

Stump:

23% agree or is there a bigger—

Vaidyanathan:

No. I think it’s 11% who agree, and then there’s a few who are not sure. It’s a very small fraction. And I see, there is precedent, right? For some time in the 20th century, you did find a number of scientists whose equations were really beautiful, and initially the experimental data contradicted those experiments. They said, wait and see. And eventually turned out the experiments were wrong. But the argument now that a lot of people are making, particularly like Sabine Hossenfelder, is that beauty is just really this kind of, our particular aesthetic criteria are an impediment to progress in science. That there really is no necessary connection between what I find beautiful and what happens to be true in the way reality is structured. And maybe for a while when you’re starting out in a new paradigm, you might have some traction, but it seems we’ve outlived this particular aesthetic framework, is what some people are arguing.

Especially since now we’ve got a lot of these equations that are in principle untestable. So a lot of string theory people argue or multiverse stuff is it’s going to be impossible to even imagine how one would experimentally validate this. And so there are people who, Jim Baggott and others have called it fairytale physics, that this is, or Peter White says, this stuff is not even wrong. We don’t even know what it is. There’s some very strong critics, and yet they’re also defenders, people like Frank Wilczek who really do think that we can access, that there is beauty in the deep structure of reality and we have access to that and our equations are able to give us some traction on that. It really is an interesting tension.

[musical interlude]

BioLogos:

Hey, Language of God listeners, thanks for tuning into another conversation about the intersection of science and Christian faith. If you’d like to hear more of these conversations, you might be interested in inviting one of our speakers to your church, college or another event near you. The BioLogos Voices Speakers Bureau includes some of the top scientists and scholars in the BioLogos community, and they are all passionate about sharing their stories and expertise with others. Go to biologos.org/voices to learn more about how to request a speaker or find out if any of them will be coming to an event near you. Now, back to the conversation.

Stump:

Well, I’d like to probe a couple of different ideas about beauty with you, particularly related to objectivity versus subjectivity. And one of these we hear quite often that beauty is only in the eye of the beholder. The other, I’m borrowing a phrase from Jesus and adapting a little bit and wondering whether we simply need the eyes to see beauty, where the first of those, beauty is in the eye of the beholder is just a commitment to beauty being subjective. When I say something is beautiful, that’s more a statement about me than it is about the object itself. But that second one, needing eyes to see is a little more complex. And I’m hoping I’m pushing in the right direction here of understanding that. Because it seems to acknowledge that maybe not everyone sees the same things as beautiful, but that might be because they haven’t been trained to see it properly. Does that kind of idea have any purchase in the work you’ve done on beauty and perhaps even in resolving some of these disputes among the physicists you were just talking about there? Can we be trained to see beauty in a way that we might acknowledge that it really is there, it’s just that we weren’t seeing it properly before?

Vaidyanathan:

Yeah, yeah. I think both of them are correct to some degree. There are things that might just be purely subjectively pleasurable. There are people who find torture and other kinds of things pleasurable, and we lock them up, which that is probably the right thing to do. There’s certainly subjective aspects to it. I don’t think that most scientists would see all of beauty as purely subjective. It’s funny that a lot of them do tend to repeat that adage, and then you find that they find exactly the same things beautiful in their community. So then it seems like what’s going on is more the second thing that they have as a community learned how to value the same things as beautiful. Not only that, they’re training their students, they’re training the future generations to value the same things.

I think it’s very difficult to transmit knowledge without communicating that ideal of here’s what a good study looks like, here’s what a good journal article looks like. Here’s what a good diagram or a table or a well-designed experiment looks like. You have to do it. And those are standards that are developed in a community. Some scientists have warned us that some of these things could be fads. So the things that we find beautiful, an idea that we find beautiful for now, phlogiston or something like that, which could be a really compelling idea that is seen for a while as a really, the epicycles that they used to explain planetary orbits were seen perhaps as aesthetically pleasing once upon a time, and then are no longer. So our tastes do change. And that’s also important to note.

I do think that beauty is part of understanding, part of what we want to argue is that understanding is an aesthetic experience. It is a type of beauty. It is a kind of harmony. It’s really listening to a symphony or something like that, that is an experience that moves us. It makes it worthwhile for us to do what we do. And so we want to say that science is no different from music or poetry and that being that aesthetic quest that really are seeking that coming together of our inquiry into the world and then the world’s self disclosure to us. And when those come together with a correspondence, then that is beauty just like it is in music.

Stump:

Maybe I’m wanting to ask this question to push out of just the relationship to science and to beauty in general, whether it’s art or music or landscapes. Because my question about having the eyes to see isn’t just, though it’s partially, isn’t just related to cultural standards. There are certainly those, definitions or acceptance of beauty that changes from culture to culture and over time within the same culture. And we have contests for art that some is better than other in various ways, that there’s a learning, a training to see the beauty in that. But I’m pushing even a little bit further and wondering in what’s sometimes called the transcendental qualities of truth, goodness, and beauty, and whether they point to something even beyond the social reality that might exist within cultures to things in reality itself beyond social reality and physical reality. Do these transcendental qualities that there can even be such a thing as beauty point us towards something that’s even more objective in the world?

Vaidyanathan:

It’s a tough question to answer with the tools of social science. And that’s what I’m trying to figure out, what can we do with the tools we have at our disposal. I’m inclined to think that metaphysically being per se is true and good and beautiful, everything that is has those properties. But then once you get to the level of how things are in the world, those things get disentangled. You find things that might seem beautiful but may not be true, right? Mathematical equations that seem like they meet all the aesthetic criteria that mathematicians might have, but there just is no evidence for those sorts of equations being true in reality or things that are beautiful but not good and things like, I don’t know, I was looking at some of the work that was done in the physics of the Manhattan project and developing the atomic bomb, and there were a lot of aesthetic judgments about how sweet those models were and the science was, and yet the result of that was not good for humanity.

And so those things seem disentangled at those levels. Part of my inclination is to say that beauty can derail us from truth and goodness, and we need to try to find where beauty is tethered to truth and to goodness. It’s also bad I think to have truth without beauty, to try to, as a lot of religious education tends to be, which is unfortunate. But that’s really I think what drives actually even a lot of scientists we’ve talked to, what drives them away from religion is not science, but it’s religion itself and how religion is communicated. And so beauty is really important. And then the link between beauty and goodness I think is what I was looking for in those social movements, trying to understand what is good about dedicating our lives to this cause and where’s the beautiful ideal. I don’t know if I’m getting at your question, but I do think—

Stump:

You are. Let me ask you a more straightforward sociological question then that’s related to this. Among that say 11% of those physicists who thought there was something to equations being beautiful, is there any correlation between the people who would say that and those who may have religious leanings in some way?

Vaidyanathan:

I don’t know, but I can check. We’ve not looked into that, but I’d be happy to look into it and let you know after.

Stump:

I’m wondering what to think about somebody who says there really is beauty that is being reflected in these equations that we’re modeling, but that they themselves don’t have any belief in a transcendent reality beyond.

Vaidyanathan:

They could be platonists, right? I don’t think it’s necessarily a religious in the sense of conventional, today’s world religions, but I think that many ancient Greeks had that view or even Egyptians—

Stump:

This connection between beauty and religion, do you know whether religious people in general think about beauty in any different ways or find different kinds of things beautiful?

Vaidyanathan:

We find in our data there’s no connection, which I was surprised by.

Stump:

Really?

Vaidyanathan:

In fact, there were some folks who were telling us that they don’t see any relationship between their religious faith and the beauty they find in science. And they say things like, my secular colleagues would find the same things beautiful that I do and my scientific work I don’t see any difference. Where we do find some relationship is between awe and spirituality. So people who consider themselves spiritual, whether or not they’re religious, they’re more inclined to, they experience awe more frequently in their workplace and in their scientific work. That’s the only variables. We’ve got measures for awe and wonder and beauty. And beauty here means things like seeing the hidden order or inner logic of things or symmetry or elegance. Those kinds of encountering those sorts of things in your work.

And then we have experiences of awe, which is more a sense of being pulled out of oneself, being in the presence of something grand or vast, et cetera. And then wonder is that sense of childlike delight at discovering something or being kept up at night by a problem, et cetera. And so that’s how we conceptualize these terms. And so the only one that seems to differ is awe, that sense of being in this presence of something vast or grand. And that’s for a lot of people, at least scientists, that’s what spirituality itself means to them, is having those kinds of experiences. And they are people who are more spiritual or identify as more spiritual tend to also be more dispositionally attuned to beauty and awe and wonder. So that’s where the difference is.

But it’s not around religion per se. We have a lot of scientists in our data, particularly from India, who consider themselves religious but not spiritual. And by that I think they mean they go to religious, they’re part of religious—

Stump:

They’re involved.

Vaidyanathan:

—ceremonies and so on, but it doesn’t mean anything to them.

Stump:

Outside of science and perhaps religion, again, but beauty in general, what kind of cross-cultural agreement is there on standards of beauty? Are we hardwired to see certain things as beautiful or is it all cultural when we get down to that level?

Vaidyanathan:

The neuroscientific work, this is the work done by Anjan Chatterjee and colleagues at UPenn, suggests that there are some cultural universals it seems, there tends to be more of a preference towards symmetry in faces. There also is more of a cross-cultural preference for savanna like landscapes. So the argument they use is much more—

Stump:

Evolutionary.

Vaidyanathan:

Yeah. And even the symmetry in some of that research isn’t completely aligned, because there’s a sense in which we don’t like perfect symmetry. If faces are perfectly symmetrical they’re less pleasing than very slight asymmetries. But that seems to be a universal. And for a while people thought it was universal that there’s this link between, I forget what the body of research is called, but it’s this, if you have people who have scars and so on in their faces, they’re seen as evil. And there’s a lot of seemingly cross-cultural evidence for that physical deformity, that physical beauty. On the one hand the presence of that kind of beauty was associated with judgments of those people being morally good. And then the absence of that beauty, so disfigurement was associated with moral evil. But they find that in communities like African tribes that have not been exposed to modernization, they don’t find those correlations. So that research is a little bit mixed.

Stump:

How about with respect to music, I’ve read a fair bit of Iain McGilchrist, the neuroscientist and talking some about music where babies as young as four months old prefer consonants to dissonance and can associate a minor key with sadness. Right? Do you know of any research about music and its cross-cultural beauty standards?

Vaidyanathan:

Not too much. The most recent work on this I’ve read is Susan Cain’s book, Bittersweet, which summarizes a lot of the data on melancholy. And she finds that there is some evidence for sad music. We’re generally drawn to sad music more than to happy music. Like our playlists in, at least in modern societies are overwhelmingly sadder than happier. We like to listen to sadder songs. And her argument is actually, she draws on C. S. Lewis and Sufi mystics and so on, who argue that melancholy is, it reflects our deep longing for home. It taps into our sense of, maybe not alienation, but something like that. We’re somehow not at home in this world and we’re longing for home. And this kind of music is a doorway to that realm to some degree. That seems to be, again, a cross-cultural finding to some extent.

Stump:

Well, as we are drawing to a close here, I will note that you ask a lot of people where they see beauty in their work. I haven’t heard you answer that question. Where do you see beauty in your work?

Vaidyanathan:

Wow. One of the things that recently I’ve been finding probably the most beautiful is bringing people together to talk about where they find beauty in their work.

Stump:

That’s very meta.

Vaidyanathan:

I’ve been organizing these salon dinners where I bring together people from various walks of life, very different professions, different backgrounds, different cultures, religions and so on. And we have these very simple conversations around a meal. And there are two questions that we talk about. And the first is, share a moment from your childhood where you experience something profoundly beautiful that lingers with you to this day. And the second is a similar moment from your professional life. And these experiences are really, for a lot of people transformative, because they connect with each other very quickly. I think in our world today we find it very hard to connect with each other, and particularly post pandemic, I think we’re struggling. And so the beauty of connection for me, making that happen for me is probably one of the things that I find most beautiful about the work I do. Even though this is not part of my scholarship, but I’m trying to do that through the podcast that I have going and through the sort of work I’m doing. Even my teaching there’s certainly a lot of people who teach find beauty in seeing their students have a light bulb go off in their heads and so on. But for me it’s actually seeing students connect with each other. I think maybe this possibility of making human connection happen at a deeper level is for me, these days where I’m seeing beauty a lot. And then the concept of beauty is a great catalyst for that.

Stump:

Nice. Well, let me give you a chance to plug your podcast and maybe other work you have going. Where can our audience hear more about what you’ve been doing with regard to beauty?

Vaidyanathan:

Sure. So this is all brand new, I just a few months ago started a platform called Beauty at Work, so that’s www.beautyatwork.net. And it has a podcast which currently has been looking at beauty in science. It has a YouTube channel, which includes videos from the scientists as well as other folks that I’ve been talking to about beauty such as lawyers. Believe it or not, there is beauty in law. And cocktail bar owners and restaurateurs and chefs and athletes and poets and so on. There’s a YouTube channel on that as well. So if you go to beautyatwork.net, you’ll be able to see these other media as well.

Stump:

Very good. What’s next on the horizon for you? Any other big projects?

Vaidyanathan:

Well, I hope to continue to do some of this work, and it really is very exploratory, really trying to understand what beauty means to people, and particularly how it shapes the work we do, and is it potentially an antidote to burnout and what does beautiful work look like? What might beautiful business look like? What is the beauty of hospitality? There’s some of those themes that I’m hoping to pursue over the next year. I have a grant proposal under review, which might look at the spiritual yearnings of scientists. So looking at particularly non-religious scientists and the ways in which the practice of science might open the door to broader questions about the ultimate concerns and the meaningfulness of life and so forth. I don’t know yet whether that’ll succeed, but that’s something I’m interested in understanding as well.

Stump:

Very good. In conclusion we’ve been asking our guests what books they’ve been reading lately. Anything interesting on your list?

Vaidyanathan:

Oh boy, I don’t even know where to start. There’s a lot that—the thing I have currently on my desk is a book by Frank Keil at Yale called Wonder, and it’s about Childhood and the Lifelong Love of Science. I just interviewed him for my podcast, and it’s a great summary of research on how we are from a very young age drawn to wonder about causation in the world and the obstacles that get in the way of our path there. So highly recommend that book.

Stump:

Very good. Well, thanks so much for the conversation. I think I’m persuaded that I can use the word beautiful to say our conversation has been beautiful in some sense. If not, I can at least say that I certainly have enjoyed it. So thank you very much, Brandon.

Vaidyanathan:

Me too. Thank you.

BioLogos:

Language of God is produced by BioLogos. It has been funded in part by the Fetzer Institute, the John Templeton Foundation, and by individual donors and listeners who contribute to BioLogos. Language of God is produced and mixed by Colin Hoogerwerf. That’s me. Our theme song is by Breakmaster Cylinder. BioLogos offices are located in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in the Grand River watershed. If you have questions or want to join in a conversation about this episode find a link in the show notes for the BioLogos forum or visit our website, biologos.org, where you will find articles, videos and other resources on faith and science. Thanks for listening.