Appreciating the Beauty of Earth

Categories used by contemporary environmental philosophers to explore esthetic appreciation for the beauty of the physical world have parallels in reflections by patristic and medieval theologians on the beauty of God\u27s creation, A sampling of the theologians\u27 notions yields a promising foundation for ecological ethics from a theistic perspective, especially when understood from their world view at the time the text was written, reformulated to reflect broad scientific findings about the world today, and worked creatively to identify norms for human behavior

The Beauty of the Game

Imagine a deep philosophical conversation about a beautiful shot by a college player in a Final Four basketball game

The ratio of the beauty structure functions Rb=FLb/F2bR^b = F^b_L/F^b_2 at low x

We study the structure functions $F_{k}^{b}(x,Q^{2})$ ($k=2, L$) and the reduced cross section $\sigma_{r}^{b}(x,Q^{2})$ for small values of Bjorken$^{,}$s $x$ variable with respect to the hard (Lipatov) pomeron for the gluon distribution and provide a compact formula for the ratio $R^{b}$ that is useful to extract the beauty structure function from the beauty reduced cross section, in particular at DESY HERA. Also we show that the effects of the nonlinear corrections to the gluon distribution tame the behavior of the beauty structure function and the beauty reduced cross section at low $x$.Comment: 12 pages, 5 figurs, 1 table. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:hep-ph/0603017 by other author

The Beauty of Philosophy

It is what it is

The Theistic Argument from Beauty: A Philonian Critique

In this paper I consider an understudied form of the design argument which focuses on the beauty of the natural world and which argues, on that basis, that the world requires a divine Artist in order to explain its beauty. Against this view, one might raise a question concerning the beauty of, and in, this divine Artist. What explains the divine beauty? This kind of explanatory regress objection is exactly like that used by Philo in Hume’s Dialogues to undercut standard versions of the design argument focused on the orderliness of the world. Here I argue that Philo’s explanatory regress objection likewise significantly undercuts versions of the design argument focusing on the beauty of the world

The beauty of the mammalian vascular system

Beauty is a characteristic of objects that provides a perceptual experience of pleasure. In nature, aesthetic appreciation thereof has given rise to the mathematical search for good series (e.g. the Fibonacci series) and proportions (e.g. the Golden proportion) as important elements of beauty. In 1928 the mathematician George David Birkhoff introduced a formula for aesthetic measurement of an object. Birkhoff equation defines the aesthetic value as the amount of order divided by the complexity of the product. These two features can be measured easily in poetry, music, painting, architecture, etc. In the fine arts, it is the artist who manipulates both these features, but how does nature manage order and complexity in living organisms or their parts? Here we show how Birkhoff equation, applied to the mammalian vascular system of eight representative animals, results in new insights into the organization of the animal vascular system. We found that order and complexity are highly correlated in the mammalian vascular system (_R^2^_=0.9511). Accordingly, in nature both features are not independently managed in the manner of artists. We found significant differences among the Birkhoff aesthetic values in the mammalian arterial system, whereas no such differences exist in the venous system. We anticipate our approach to be useful in the study of morphogenesis and evolution of tree-like structures, employing the Birkhoff aesthetic value as a simple tool for conducting such studies