The universe wasn’t trying to be beautiful

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There is a strange thing about dust. We spend our lives trying to get rid of it. We wipe it from tables, sweep it from floors and complain about it settling on things we have just cleaned. Dust is supposed to be evidence that a room has been neglected.

And yet, put that same dust in a shaft of afternoon sunlight and it can look beautiful.

I noticed this recently while sitting near a window. I was staying in a hotel for a week and the room was really beautiful. Then the light changed when I opened all the curtains. Tiny particles became visible, floating slowly through the air. Some moved upwards, some sideways, some seemed to hang in place for a moment before disappearing into the background.

Nothing had been arranged. There was no artist behind it. Still, I kept looking. That is an odd thing about human beings. We are constantly finding beauty in things that nobody designed.

We photograph clouds. We stop to look at the patterns left by waves on a beach. We collect stones because of their shape. We admire the cracks in an old wall. We call a snowflake beautiful even though nobody designed its geometry.

We usually think of beauty as a consequence of order. A straight line is orderly. Repetition is orderly. Much of human architecture shows this instinct. But nature's most beautiful things are often not orderly in that sense.

Look at a tree. No two branches are identical. A leaf is not a perfect geometric object. The bark is full of irregularities. Or look at a coastline from above. It doesn't follow a neat geometric plan. It bends, breaks, curves and doubles back.

Yet we find it beautiful. Maybe because it is neither completely ordered nor completely random. That distinction matters to a physicist. The dust on my table looks random. But random does not mean lawless.

Every particle got there somehow. Gravity pulled it down. Air currents carried it. It collided with other particles. It bounced. It was slowed by friction. Eventually it stopped.

If I knew the exact position and velocity of every particle, along with every tiny movement of air around it, I could in principle describe its journey.

Of course, I don't know any of that. Neither does anyone else. There are simply too many variables. So we call the final arrangement random.

But there is something almost poetic about that. What looks like randomness may actually be a physical history we are incapable of reconstructing. A small patch of dust is therefore not as meaningless as it appears.

It is the end of thousands, perhaps millions, of tiny interactions. We see the pattern. We don't see the history. The same thing happens on a much larger scale. Take a cloud. We look up and see a shape. Sometimes it resembles an animal or a face. But a cloud is not an object in the ordinary sense. It is water undergoing constant changes in temperature, pressure and motion.

There is no boundary telling one part of a cloud where to stop being a cloud. And yet it can look astonishing. Maybe beauty isn't entirely a property of the thing being observed.

Our brains are pattern-finding machines. We are constantly searching for regularities. It is one of the reasons we can make sense of a complicated world at all. Give the brain enough irregular shapes and it will start looking for something familiar.

A face in a cloud. A figure in a shadow. An animal in the pattern of a rock. But that doesn't make the experience less real.

Imagine a wall covered with identical dots. There is order, but nothing much happens. Now scatter the dots completely at random. There is surprise, but no obvious structure. Somewhere between the two is where things become interesting.

A snowflake is a wonderful example. Its six-fold symmetry comes from the physics of ice crystallisation. But no two snowflakes grow in exactly the same way. Small changes in temperature and humidity alter how each branch develops.

The rules are simple. The result isn't. That idea appears everywhere in nature. Lightning branches. Rivers divide. Trees grow. Waves break. None of these requires an architect. And yet they produce forms that we find extraordinarily compelling.

This is one of the things physics has taught me to appreciate more: complexity does not necessarily require a complicated set of instructions. Sometimes simple rules, repeated over time, are enough. We see this and sometimes instinctively assume there must be some intention behind it. But physics doesn't require intention.

Gravity does not know what shape a mountain should have. Water does not decide where a river should turn. A snowflake does not know that we will photograph it. The universe is under no obligation to produce beautiful things.

And perhaps that is exactly why they are beautiful.

I have also started to think that this may explain our affection for imperfect things. An old wooden table can be more interesting than a new one. A handmade cup can feel better in the hand precisely because it isn't perfectly uniform. An old building with peeling paint can have more character than a freshly painted wall.

The imperfections tell us something happened.

Time happened. Weather happened. People happened. Physics happened. A perfect object tells us about its manufacture. An imperfect one often tells us about its life.

Perhaps that is why we don't always want beauty to be clean. We want it to have evidence of existence. And that brings me back to the dust.

I know what it is. It is dirt. It needs cleaning. But for a few seconds, when the sunlight crossed the room, I wasn't looking at dirt. I was looking at particles following the laws of physics. I was watching gravity, air currents, collisions and light produce a pattern that nobody had planned.

The pattern will disappear. I will wipe the desk. Tomorrow another one will form. That may be the real lesson. We spend much of our time looking for beauty in things humans have deliberately made beautiful. Physics keeps pointing in the opposite direction.

There is beauty in things that have no intention. Nature is simply following its laws. Sometimes, when those laws play themselves out across enough particles, enough time and enough chance, we happen to be there to notice the result.

And maybe that is all beauty has ever required.

Nishant Sahdev is a physicist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He chases ideas that refuse to stay in laboratories, for your favourite Sunday mid-day.