The Mysterious and the Beautiful

Usually we think that science deals with solutions. Science knows the truth and the truth ist full of beauty which in turn is good. But while we celebrate the 100th anniversary of Ein-stein´s miracle year we should not forget his famous insight, „Das Schönste, was wir erleben können, ist das Geheimnis-volle. Es ist das Grundgefühl, das an der Wiege von wahrer Kunst und Wissenschaft steht.“ “The most beautiful that we can experience is the mysterious. It is the basic feeling that forms the source of all true art and science.” And don´t forget: Einstein did not explain light when he introduced its duality (meaning that light cannot be understood solely as a wave but also has to be considered as a particle). On the contrary, Ein-stein demonstrated that ligth cannot be explained. It remains mysterious even today and I think that this is part of its beauty.

There are many more items in science that we can call mysteri-ous. Life itself is a mystery and especially if we focus on its development. (We call it even today a miracle if a child is born). Since its mysteriousness makes life so beautiful we learn that serious efforts to explain it are in need of more than the naming of causal factors called genes. When life appears it is beautiful and this fact will never be explained by analyzing genetic mutants. You have to think of life as a piece of art pro-duced by a creative genome. Life is the art of genes.

Not only light and life are mysterious (and thus beautiful), but science itself belongs here. Science is beautiful since it works so well. But why is this the case? It remains as mysterious as ever and there is no simple logic to explain its progress. But there are other aspects and their beauty will be introduced and discussed.