hughbiquitous

I’ve wondered recently about beauty. Why are some things beautiful and other things aren’t? Why is it that a thing can be beautiful to one person, but hideous to another? Why is it that beauty often defies definition, yet we know exactly what it means? How come immaterial things can be beautiful?

One oft-cited immaterial bearer of beauty is mathematics. Physicists and mathematicians reportedly wept over the beauty of Einstein’s proofs. Paul Erdős, the late mathematician, has said, “Why are numbers beautiful? It’s like asking why Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is beautiful. If you don’t see why, someone can’t tell you. I know numbers are beautiful. If they aren’t beautiful, nothing is.”

The sublime beauty of mathematics is lost on those of us who have not paid the high price of admission to join the elite fraternity that includes men like Isaac Newton, John Nash, and countless others you’ve never heard of. This makes me sad, because it doesn’t take long before mathematicians turn into theologians when they behold the elegance of the way numbers relate to one another.

Exhibit A: Euler’s Identity. It is simply this: e^iπ+1=0. Impressed? Are you slack-jawed at the astonishing beauty of this equation? Few people are, but blessed are those who “get it,” I say. A mathematics professor at MIT, an atheist, has said of Euler’s Identity, “There is no God, but if there were, this formula would be proof of his existence.” I wish I could appreciate that. I feel like I’m missing out.

Erdős, also an atheist, said, “God may not play dice with the universe, but something strange is going on with the prime numbers.” Here’s what he means: look at this picture of the prime numbers, plotted graphically. The white dots are primes; the black dots are non-primes. Notice a pattern? Click the image to see all the primes from 1 to 1,299,827 plotted like this.

Why should prime numbers line up like this? When numbers—which are uncreated and necessary (in the sense of “it could not be otherwise”)—exhibit an aesthetic like this, I can understand why mathematicians turn into theologians. Galileo reportedly claimed that “mathematics is the language with which God wrote the universe.”

I have a faint idea of why he might say such a thing. But I daresay a musician could say the same thing about his art; C. S. Lewis had Aslan sing Narnia into existence. Similar claims could be advanced by a programmer or a painter or any manner of craftsman, I suppose. Whatever form beauty takes for a person, it stirs within the soul a desire for the One who possesses beauty without limit.

(Before we leave Galileo, let me digress from mathematics into astronomy to present Spiral Galaxy IC342. As one astronomy blogger put it, “If that doesn’t impress you, close this window, shut down your computer, go find a nice hole in the ground and lie down. You have no pulse.” And Yuri Gagarin went up there and claimed he didn’t see God. Like Ellie Arroway said in Contact, “They should have sent a poet.”)

In the end, I think beauty is an apologetic for God’s existence, a signal of transcendence that leads us home. As Lewis reasoned, “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.” We desire beauty and we never tire of it; we never have our fill. Our appetite for beauty is never satisfied in this world, so the most probable explanation is that the beauty we desire resides elsewhere.

Augustine knew where to find it: “You have made us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.”

See also: God by the Numbers (Christianity Today)

Presented here is a photograph taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. The subject is disk galaxy NGC 5866. On a clear night, you might be able to spot this galaxy with a four-inch-wide telescope in your backyard—but it would look like a fuzzy wisp and you’d have to really know what you were looking for. It is about 63,000 times dimmer than the planet Jupiter.

This galaxy is almost 50 million light-years away—what you see here is the way a sliver of the universe looked 50,000,000 years ago.

This galaxy is 60,000 light-years across. That means that a star could explode at one end of the disk and an observer at the opposite end of the disk wouldn’t see it for 60,000 years.

How big is a distance of 60,000 light-years? Let’s suppose you had a map of this galaxy with a scale of 1 atom on the map = 1 meter in space. Got that? 1 atom = 1 meter. Represented on such a map, our entire solar system would fit within one and a half football fields’ area. The USA would occupy a half a millimeter. You and I would need about an atom and a half.

When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
    the moon and the stars, which you have set in place,
what is man that you are mindful of him,
    and the son of man that you care for him?

— Psalm 8:3-4

But how big would the map be? It would cover 1/3 of the distance from the Earth to the sun. Such a map would be so big, you could use it to gift-wrap all of the planets in the solar system over 25,000 times. And each one of us takes up about an atom’s worth of real estate on that map.

Sorry, that’s the best I can do to make the size of this faraway galaxy even remotely comprehensible.

Then Job answered the Lord and said:

“Behold, I am of small account; what shall I answer you?
    I lay my hand on my mouth.
I have spoken once, and I will not answer;
    twice, but I will proceed no further.”

— Job 40:3-5

But there’s more to it than sheer size. Click on the image above to see a large version. Or if you’re really ambitious, download the 11-megabyte full-resolution version.

Look in the background, far beyond NGC 5866. What do you see?

More galaxies. Lots of them. Literally hundreds of them. They’re all over the place. With millions, maybe billions, of stars in each of them. And those background galaxies are millions-to-billions of light-years farther away.

The heavens declare the glory of God,
    and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.

— Psalm 19:1

There’s more. Look closely at the dark edge-on view of the disk. What do you see?

You see tiny dots of bright, bluish light. Those “dots”—barely visible unless you look at the full-resolution version—are clusters of a million stars. Each. Our entire solar system would fit inside one of those dots many, many times over.

We have one star, a wimp by cosmic standards, and it lives a hundred million miles away. It takes light from our sun less than ten minutes to reach us.

In one dot that you can’t see unless you download a gigantic photograph taken by a satellite with a 2.5-hour exposure time, there are millions of stars that put our sun to shame. And their light is just now reaching us after a journey that took 50 million years.

You, Lord, laid the foundation of the earth in the beginning,
    and the heavens are the work of your hands;
they will perish, but you remain;
    they will all wear out like a garment,
like a robe you will roll them up,
    like a garment they will be changed.
But you are the same,
    and your years will have no end.

— Hebrews 1:10-12

No more words… I am undone. O God, have mercy on me, a sinner!

Update: Get Google Earth and view NGC 5866 as it appears in the sky, just west of the Big Dipper.