Title: "The Beauty of Understanding: Scientific Understanding as Aesthetic Experience"
Abstract: Do scientists find beauty in their work, and if so, in what ways? To answer these questions, we present findings from the first international study to explore the role of aesthetics in scientific work, involving a survey of nearly 3500 scientists and in-depth interviews with 215 scientists from physics and biology departments in four countries: India, Italy, the UK, and the US. We find that scientists do indeed find beauty in many aspects of scientific practice, from the natural phenomena they study and the technology, experiments, and theories they work with, to teaching, collaborating, and communicating their work. Underlying and connecting all these aspects is the beauty scientists find in understanding, whether on their own part or facilitated on the part of others. We argue that what we call the “beauty of understanding” is the core aesthetic experience afforded by scientific practice. We focus this talk on developing a theoretical account of scientific understanding as an aesthetic experience, for which we draw upon American pragmatist theories of inquiry and aesthetics and examples from our interviews with scientists.