In the nuts-and-bolts world we have become, everything needs to be measured. Otherwise it is shunted aside as worthless. If it can’t be quantified, what good is it?
Physical beauty – remember something about it being in the eye of the beholder? – has now been quantified. Yes, some scientists have measured the parameters of what people have called beautiful and actually quantified the results.
Poetry has been examined under their microscope as well and reduced to mathematics.
Still with all the categorizing and quantifying, no one has yet been able to produce anything from the formula. Computer programs written to reproduce the process usually result in music, poetry, or artwork that seems to miss the truly essential element in all these things: transcendent emotions.
Truly great works of art in any medium are, essentially, an emotional comment on part of our existence. Theirs is some part of that equation that cannot be reduced to numbers. Some part of it that is unquantifiable.
And that really drives mathematicians nuts!
Everything should be quantifiable, they argue.
What if that is not quite correct. What if it is only true that the truly meaningless things can be quantified and the really important things can only be experienced and measured only by the recipient. The beholder, if you will.
There seem to be too halves to our brain, for different purposes. Perhaps, like with our two eyes, we can view the world in more than a single dimension.
But which half is connected to the heart?
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Tags: creativity, economics, mathematics, science
