Abstract

There is a particular irony that chemistry – the most visual, tactile, and pungent of sciences – is rarely associated with modern notions of aesthetics and science. Indeed, as any examination of aesthetics and modern science reveals, physics, rather than chemistry or biology, is considered the paradigm because of its extraordinary ability to comprehend and communicate through the symbolic language of mathematics. Echoing Heisenberg’s 1970 essay, "The Meaning of Beauty in the Exact Sciences", this perspective on physics takes the inherent abstraction of quantum mechanics and relativity as the result of the physicists’ search for beauty in nature.