It takes 100,000 years to produce so much beauty

Compelled to name things, we have named ourselves Homo sapiens: sapient humans, hominids who reflect and consider and understand, primates who know things. Another way to look at us—I don’t know Latin, so I’m guessing at this…would be Homo ordinatus? Orderly humans. Or, better, “hominids who discern order,” whether that order is apparent or not. And who try to impose it whether it’s actually there or not. We count, we measure, we spot connections, we determine structure. We can’t help ourselves. A workable definition of “curiosity” might be “the desire to search for order.” A need to sort out. Randomness disorder entropy give us the jitters, like the lack of commas that would bring order to this sentence. Within our electrochemical minds, without order there’s no meaning, and without meaning we are sad, aimless, agitated, often dangerous creatures.

Leopards, muskrats, blue jays, salmon, my housecats, they all have a sense of order, too, but at a lower order of abstraction. (Maybe. Every time we pay close attention to an animal, it turns out to be smarter than we thought.) They detect order so they can appropriately respond. That sort of order over there means danger—run from it. Oh, that’s food—eat it. I smell a rival on my territory, and I’m going to sort this out right now by peeing on the next six trees. That guy who lives here, I bet I can get him to scratch my chin, which he does whenever I do this cute thing. Works every time. Animals don’t care about understanding order because they have no need to. (Again, maybe.) A migratory bird doesn’t care how the earth’s magnetic field works, it just needs to use it to navigate. But Homo ordinatus cares.

Physicists tell us the universe is inevitably devolving toward entropy. When it reaches that dead point, I suppose there will still be a universe, but to a sapient Homo with a hypothetical vantage point outside this entropic space-time, would it really be a universe? I don’t see how, not without order. Or is entropy just another form of order? Order zero? I dunno.

For thousands of years we have thought a lot about the fundamental building blocks of this orderly universe. The ancient Greeks said, Earth, water, air, fire, and æther! Democritus said, Atoms! The theorists Silverberg and Eischen say, Fragments of energy! A digital physicist says, Code! A conventional physicist says, Waves and particles and mass and energy! (And dark matter and dark energy, which are…we’ll have to get back to you on that.) Mathematicians say, Math! British mathematicians say, Maths! In the Old Testament, John 1:1 says, The Word!

And how is it all arranged? A flat disk surrounded by water! The body of the goddess Nut! A crocodile in a waterous underworld! Elephants atop a tortoise! A world tree! Like a huge mechanical clock! By equations! Quantum mechanics! String theory! The multiverse! Hand me that bag of mushrooms and ask me again in a few hours!

Reading popular physics books doesn’t make me a physicist, but I’m going to pretend I’m one and propose another schema of universal order—beauty. It doesn’t require my exile from hard science. Mathematicians and physicists frequently describe profound equations as “elegant.” Computer scientists speak of “beautiful code.” Henri Poincaré, who really was a physicist, said, “If nature were not beautiful, it would not be worth knowing, and life would not be worth living.” So, let’s hypothesize a Standard Model of the Beautiful Universe. A Physics of Beauty. And let’s start with ice. Let’s start with icebergs.

Homo ordinatus has created a classification of icebergs. Of course we have. The International Ice Patrol designates a piece of floating ice less than 1 meter by 5 meters as a growler. From 1-to-5 by 5-to-15 meters is a bergy bit. From there the designations become prosaic: small, medium, large, very large. The largest iceberg ever measured, designated as B-15 (talk about prosaic), broke off from the Ross Sea Ice Shelf in 2000. Its surface area encompassed 11,000 square kilometers, about the size of Jamaica. That’s a lot of growlers.

“Iceberg” derives from the Danish ijsberg, which means “ice mountain.” Linguistically, the word is what is known as a calque, or a loan translation—somewhere in the past, English speakers could have adopted “ice mountain” or something similar, but apparently preferred how “iceberg” sounds, borrowed the Danish word intact, and Anglicized its spelling. An ijsberg floats even if it’s as big as Jamaica because the density of ice is ~920 kg/cubic meter and the density of seawater is ~1,025 kg/cubic meter, and isn’t that lucky for us? At least, those of us who like to circle them cautiously in a Zodiac boat?

I circled the two pictured above off the coast of East Greenland. The first was a pinnacle iceberg, the second a more common tabular berg. Both were immense, silent, and spellbinding.

To approach an iceberg is to experience something of what 19th-century German philosophers meant by the sublime. Immanuel Kant, tapping his inner Homo ordinatus, posited three types of sublimity: noble, splendid, and terrifying. Up close, an iceberg looms, forbidding in mass, splendidly reflecting light that is overwhelming in quantity and complexity and beauty, with most of it ominously lurking unseen in the darkening depths. Any iceberg floating in sufficient ocean has the potential to roll over in an instant with no warning, generating tremendous energy and a massive displacement wave. So: noble, splendid, terrifying. Not to be outdone by Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer created a taxonomy of the sublime. His had six levels. Second highest was the full feeling of overpowering, turbulent nature, and the pleasure derived from witnessing beauty that could turn violent and destructive.

Check.

The mechanics of glaciers, and therefore the mechanics of icebergs, is well understood. Snow falls in a place so cold that instead of melting, it accumulates for centuries; Homo ordinatus measures this accumulation in a location as specific balance rate, and over time as net balance. Decades go by, the snow piles up, and the weight of the upper layers compresses the lower layers into a granular form of ice, which gets further crushed into rock-hard glacial ice. When this ice reaches a depth of around 50 meters, something as miraculous as water-into-wine happens: granitic frozen water transforms into something that resembles a viscous fluid, and the mass of ice starts to flow. To describe the physics of the viscous deformation, we have the Stokes equations (a simplified set of the Navier-Stokes equations, but you knew that already). More equations describe the momentum: Once the irreversible slide (also referred to, bluntly, as “creep”) has begun, we measure flow velocity, and we model what’s happening with the Weertman Sliding Law and the regularized Coulomb friction law. Those equations describe how the very bottom of the ice melts, creating a thin layer of water that lubricates the creep; this process is called regelation. Gravity overcomes drag and tons of ice flow toward the sea. Once there, melting and its own tremendous weight causes chunks of the glacier to fracture and drop into the water. There are more metrics for this—buoyancy, density variation, cold core temperature—but I sense I may be trying your patience.

And anyway, it is time to consider the Physics of Beauty, the powerful effects that icebergs achieve with color, texture, geometry, fractals, light, and sheer mass. My first encounter with an iceberg in the ocean was off the coast of Newfoundland. It had floated from West Greenland, a majestic envoy traveling on what Canadians call Iceberg Alley. I had never seen anything in the natural world more beautiful. I still haven’t.

An iceberg’s order according to the Physics of Beauty is complex. There is no grand unifying equation. When the glacier calves, the berg that floats away is irregular in shape and, once buoyant, it rotates to a new equilibrium. What were once horizontal layers become diagonal markers of process. A glacier may achieve a viscous state, but as it creeps to the sea it grinds the rock beneath it like a giant millstone. The crushed rock becomes part of the frozen river, and when the iceberg finds its new center of gravity it reveals a darkened layer, sometimes more or less straight, sometimes a jagged diagonal like black lightning. Continuous snowfall traps air, and over centuries, compression forces that air out of the ice, but not in an evenly distributed way. A layer may form that contains so little trapped air, it turns a transcendent blue, a blue that arrests the eye and draws you into a meditative state that approaches oblivion. The canted ice presents this blue as another stripe, roughly parallel to the black pulverized rock layer. I have come across bergy bits composed entirely of this blue ice. They are hypnotic.

Though it’s not often considered as such, size is an aesthetic quality; much of an iceberg’s beauty derives from its dimension, it’s awesome mass and deep time (some of the ice may be 110,000 years old). There are things that humble us in ways that are frightening, or at least sobering, and beautiful at the same time. We are overwhelmed and for a blessed time cannot think. We see before the words intervene, our vision unmediated by language. Boundaries vanish and we give ourselves up to awe. The moment stays with us forever.

As a visual artist I am attentive to light. There is no way I could ever convey in words the light reflected by an iceberg, its intensity and fire and complexity, the complicated planar geometry it reveals, the minute-by-minute changes in hue as the sun’s angle progresses through the day. So I reach for my camera. I use the physics of the electronic sensor and apply the Physics of Beauty and do my best to make a rectangle of light and form and line and color that lets you feel a bit of what I felt. The image stops the time of conventional physics to permit a longer beholding of the deep time of the ice.

In about 10 days, I head for Antarctica. There, I will encounter penguins, which should be fun, and whales, which is always a profound experience. But I am going to float among the ice.

Any physics worthy of consideration needs to define its fundamental elements. What is the elementary particle here? The muon or neutrino or Higgs boson of beauty? A beautum? A beautino?

That last one feels right. Yes.

A beautino.