![]() ![]() ![]() His patients weren’t the standard Valley girls and divorcées whose breasts a doctor could breezily augment to the tinkle of a Japanese water feature before checking his teeth in the shine of his scalpel and heading off for cocktails at Skybar. Stephen Marquardt, a plastic surgeon working in Southern California at the tail end of the 20th century, who checked in on the progress of the Science of Beauty since Pythagoras and found that very little had been made.Īs Los Angeles plastic surgeons go, Marquardt (now retired from clinical practice) was the serious, unsleazy sort. Imagine the surprise, therefore, of one Dr. Among historians of science, that’s what is known as a rollicking and auspicious start. In short, the Science of Beauty was inaugurated by the two classical thinkers upon whose shoulders the science of pretty much everything else would eventually come to rest. On the contrary, to borrow Plato’s legendary cave metaphor, the beholder had his back to Beauty, able to see only its flickering shadows on the grimy cave wall of reality. Beauty was not in the eye of the beholder. This was good enough for Plato, the 800-pound gorilla of ancient Greek intellectual life, to include Beauty as one of his famous forms: those transcendent, invisible archetypes of which this reality is nothing but a set of blurry ramshackle imitations. Palpably, it’s the first rectangle that occurred to God when he realized he needed another four-sided, right-angled shape to complement his juvenile masterpiece, the square. If you were to be stranded on a desert island with one particular rectangle, that’s the one you’d go with. But draw a rectangle-or build a Parthenon-with sides of a and b, and the sheer cosmic rightness of the thing leaps out at you. This doesn’t sound like much in algebra form ( a/b = ( a + b )/ a ) and still less when expressed as a decimal (1:1.61814). The golden ratio, briefly, is the proportional relationship between two lines a and b such that (a + b) is to a as a is to b in other words, the ratio between the whole and one of its parts is the same as the ratio between its two parts. In architecture and design, similarly, he managed to show that the shapes people found most pleasing were those whose sides were related by the so-called golden ratio. In music, Pythagoras showed that the notes of the musical scale were not arbitrary but reflected the tones produced by a lute string-or any string-when its length was subdivided precisely into such simple ratios as 2:1 or 3:2. Indeed, no less a thinker than Pythagoras, he of hypotenuse fame, logged some impressive early results. The ancient Greeks, for their part, were convinced that an explanation of, and definition for, Beauty was as concrete and discoverable as the answer to why the days got shorter in winter or why your toga weighed more after you’d gone swimming in it. But while people may care about being beautiful as much as they ever did, it seems they have largely stopped trying to figure out what Beauty actually is.
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