Nature Inquiries

by Carl Strang

Nature Inquiries is about providing examples and methods of scientific inquiry that are accessible to anyone who wants to invest some time and thought in developing and answering questions about nature. I have in mind the person who, like me, enjoys exploring outdoor settings and wants to learn more about them, but doesn’t have the resources or background to engage in full-blown formal studies.

As such, we can afford to relax and open ourselves to the many little joys and side trips that may offer themselves along the way. One of the most important of these is the experience of beauty.

A lot has been written about beauty, but it all seems to boil down to the conclusion that beauty is an experience, rather than a quality of some piece of the physical world. It is “in the eye of the beholder,” and has no existence apart from our experience of it. And yet, we often find a common agreement that this or that object or scene is beautiful.

We are whole beings. The questions of our inquiries may engage our minds, but the beauty we find along the way is properly regarded as a more emotional or even spiritual experience. At the same time, the patterns we discover in our inquiries, the answers we turn up, paradoxically inspire feelings that are very close to, if not the same as, the experience of beauty. In my view this is a valuable outcome, side product, and ultimately motivator for those of us who are driven to go outside and explore the many mysteries that surround us.

In other words, there is no need to become so narrowly focused on an inquiry that we lose sight of the opportunities to experience beauty. I have attempted to illustrate this on a regular basis in this blog, and will continue to do so.