“Oh, you mean like stars and stuff.”

I should be doing a spot of science writing, but my goodness this is too delicious not to share. From Vlastos’ Plato’s Universe (OUP Clarendon 1975 edition, from p. 1; I’ve naughtily screen-captured the amazon scan with GIMP, but we all know I could have typed it by hand):

There are two points to make here. First, cosmologists are applied aestheticians of a particular kind – not so much generators of new work, in the sense of creative art, as structurers of the pre-existing disorder (that of the Universe filtered through our inability to observe it properly) into a coherent single idea. Too much blather has been written about the ‘beauty’ of mathematics for me to justify carrying this thread beyond noting that very few of those who allege the bela matematiko attribute any of it to the bringing about of an ordered state, instead they prefer to gape at how equally unintelligible quantum field theory and Hindi are:

“Lucidly analyzes the tenets of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism to show their striking parallels with the latest discoveries in cyclotrons.”— New York Magazine

Enough of that then.

Second, and more importantly, my bitterness at being confused for a cosmetologist is unjustified. To the many of you out there who wondered, however briefly, whether that stern, bespectacled young gentlemen you’d met a moment ago did in fact just suggest he spent his day with nail files and hair curlers – you weren’t so far off after all. And now I have something interesting to talk to the barber about.

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