How do you process music? Do you let the music flow over you? Do you translate the sound to notes? Do you look at the fingering and movement of the player? The answers perhaps depends on your level of knowledge and talent in the instruments that generate the music. The beauty of music is that you can enjoy it at any or all of these levels. I would argue that it is the same for science. Whether the details are in the equations or in the instrumental apparatus, you can still enjoy the phenomenon.
When you look at the sky during the day or at sunset what do you see? It’s likely you’ve noticed that the sky is blue, and sunsets are red. I see that too, but I also think about the jumble of collisions between photons and the particles in the sky. The red photons are less likely to be back scattered than the blue ones… So in the end, the red ones get jumbled less, and reach my eye directly as the sun is setting. The blue photons scatter more and spread across the sky. Each of those trajectories involves equations describing the motion of the photons and one could try to follow them too. But actually, there are so many that no one can really follow them all. Instead, it is their emergent behavior that can be tracked in some collective way. You might think that that emergent dance of photons is all of the beauty in and of itself. You, like me, might find all the fun in determining the governing equations and finding their solution. Or you might remain steadfast that the beauty lies in a visually arresting sunset as if it were a painting. Regardless, the beauty comes out from science!
