What made you want to write a book on beauty?
This world is a beautiful place. Sometimes that is easy to forget. I have always wanted to be able to explain this beauty as something objective, a fact, a quality about the way the world evolved, not just some subjective human opinion. It turned out that realization of beauty was one of the motivating factors behind Darwin’s discovery of evolution, a fact that science seems to have forgotten. I wanted to bring this history back into today’s discussion about what life is and how it got here.
You’re a musician, what are you doing writing about visual art?
Right, I have no idea what I’m talking about. But everyone around me is a visual artist—my mother is a painter, my father was an architect, my wife is an artist, I grew up with discussions of modernism and postmodernism and surrealism and impressionism all around the house. Over the years I became fascinated with the idea that paying attention to abstract twentieth century art has led us to see nature in a new way, and I was surprised no one had written about this. I really wanted to see in what ways art has specifically influenced science, and how it might have more influence in the future.
