What might beauty say about why we are here?

A three minute video asking what is beauty and what it might reveal about who we are and why we are here.

We can only speculate on the reasons why nearly 14 billion years ago our universe came into existence. Perhaps it was just one of an infinite number of such universes emerging through what is called eternal inflation. A bubble. A blip in an unimaginably vast universe of universes. Still, it is ours. The only home we have and likely the only home we will ever know.

Our world is beautiful. One of the earliest and most profound insights of the Greek philosophers was that the world we inhabit is good. Surely the beauty they observed in it was part of that goodness. The preparations for the afterlife among even earlier civilizations included favored items from this world, suggesting that they too found this world good and beautiful. They prepared for a world like this in the life after this one passed.

But, what is beauty? And where did it come from?

Like perhaps most, I thought the answer to the question of the tree falling in the forest was, of course, it made a sound. How could it not? A tree falling with a crash would be loud. But then someone pointed out that vibrations of molecules are not…