ABSTRACT
The author focuses on three major areas where the popular imagination is inspired by the beauty in science, before moving on to a fourth, neuroscience, where the knowledge is more novel, but where the aesthetic again plays a role in popular reception. This will then allow people to start thinking about some of the challenges that might be raised to his argument, principally on neuroscientific and evolutionary grounds. Indeed, cosmology, geology, evolution and neuroscience are battlegrounds in the conflicts between scientific and religious views of the world precisely because they are vividly present in the culture and the minds. The experience of beauty is a boundary moment, a transition point in scientific study in which people make a decisive move from the subjective to the objective. Natural selection is perhaps the most accessible route to appreciate the way in which recognition of the world's beauty empowers scientific discovery.
