[]I would like to express again, for those who missed the first two installments of this series, that the views expressed within the essays are those of the physicists who wrote them, not me. It’s called “Famous Physicists on Mysticism,” not “isis agora lovecruft on Mysticism.”

This essay is one of my favourite, and it is partly the inspiration for the title of this blog, although full credit has to go to Ryne Warner, whom I lived with as a roommate for several years. He’s an experimental composer, and one of his projects is called Ohioan. The first song off their album which was released last year is also the title of this blog. If you’re into Thee Silver Mt. Zion or any of the other numerous sounds that came out the Montreal scene in the first half of the last decade, you’ll like Ohioan. I used to sneak into their practice sessions just to stare at the fiddle player. His movements were a physical counter-point to the melodies. I cried a little bit one of those times, it was too pretty. I really hope he doesn’t read this…Just to show off Ryne’s talent: I highly recommend listening to Some Will Live. So. Damn. Beautiful.

Science and the Beautiful

by Werner Heisenberg

Perhaps it will be best if, without any initial attempt at a philosophical analysis of the concept of “beauty,” we simply ask where we can meet the beautiful in the sphere of exact science. Here I may perhaps be allowed to begin with a personal experience. When, as a small boy, I was attending the lowest classes of the Max-Gynasium here in Munich, I became interested in numbers. It gave me pleasure to get to know their properties, to find out, for example, whether they were prime numbers or not, and to test whether they could perhaps be represented as sums of squares, or eventually to prove that there must be infinitely many primes. Now since my father thought my knowledge of Latin to be much more important than my numerical interests, he brought home to me one day from the National Library a treatise written in Latin by the mathematician Leopold Kronecker, in which the properties of whole numbers were set in relation to the geometrical problem of dividing a circle into a number of equal parts. How my father happened to light on this particular investigations from the middle of the last century I do not know. But the study of Kronecker’s work made a deep impression on me. I sensed a quite immediate beauty in the fact that, from the problem of partitioning a circle, whose simplest cases were, of course, familiar to us in school, it was possible to learn something about the totally different sort of questions involved in elementary number theory. Far in the distance, no doubt, there already floated the question whether whole numbers and geometrical forms exist, i.e., whether they are …

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