Listening to Beauty

A moving study of how encounters with beauty advance scientific discovery.

Our attempts to understand the world are always more than rational. Even scientists, as rhetorician Megan Poole reminds us, frequently describe their findings in the language of beauty. For Poole, beauty is integral to how scientific research works.

Drawing on interviews with leading biologists, Poole explores what happens when scientists lay aside objectivity and listen for beauty around them. The wonder we feel at the plumage of birds, the melodies of whales, and the caretaking of elephants may not help us (on its own) to isolate a given fact, but such encounters may teach us to open ourselves to a different way of knowing entirely. Through stories about researchers' encounters with wonder, Listening to Beauty reveals how scientific discovery happens sometimes unsystematically, sometimes incoherently, often beautifully.