The mystery in the beauty, the beauty in the mystery

The turn of the year, when our minds alchemize the tiniest advance of time into a belief, or at least the hope, of renewal, found my wife and me with dear friends at the Delaware Bay shore. The last day of 2024 was gusty. Wind shook the house and whipped up whitecaps on the water.

Residents of this bit of shoreline have been diligent about planting beach grass to anchor the modest but essential dunes. Whenever the wind dropped to a breeze, the grass swirled and danced in waves that captivated my eye. The motion gave form to the breeze, made energy manifest, and dropped some grace and beauty into my day.

Grace, from The Oxford English Dictionary: “Possessed of pleasing or attractive qualities.” And, “Elegant in form, proportions, movement, expression, or action.”

There can be beauty absent grace. An apple can be beautiful in the right light, but it isn’t graceful, it’s just an apple—solid, roughly spherical, a bit blotchy, potentially tasty. But I don’t think there’s such a thing as grace that doesn’t contain beauty. You can no more divide beauty from grace than you can divide an electron. Color and form were part of the waving grass’s beauty, but it was the graceful movement that mesmerized. A still dancer may be pretty, but it’s the moving dancer that is beautiful.

While I was entranced by all of this, my mind got busy being its best dodgy self. I watched the energy move through the grass and thought, There are equations in there and I wonder what they are. That musing shaded into a low-grade brood about things I’ve never grasped, no matter how much I read and how hard I think.

Grasp, from Perplexity: “To take hold of something firmly with the hand. To seize and hold onto something securely. To understand or comprehend something mentally.”

Note the stacked meanings: To understand something with the mind and, simultaneously, hold its solid form in one’s hand. Not just hold it, but hold it securely. And seize it, with a verb full of vigorous action and a sense of triumph.

I know the wind is nature’s expression of a pressure gradient: The air pressure here is lower than the air pressure over there, so air flows to the lower pressure and that creates wind. But a moving gas—the air—that consists almost entirely of space between molecules, can nudge solid objects? I stick my head out the door and I feel a gust strike my face with a force that makes my eyes water? Yes, air molecules have mass and momentum, and I feel them when they strike because there are a kajillion of the little buggers, but…

The waves streaming across the bay are energy moving through the water. Some water actually moves, but most of what I see is energy traveling through the medium of the bay. Right. Now…what is energy? “The ability to perform work or create change.” Sure, I can reason my way through some physics with that, but what can I grasp? What solid thing do I seize with my grabby little hand from “the ability to perform work?”

There’s more about energy: We can neither create nor destroy it, but it’s there all the same, all the time, everywhere? Ah, c’mon. What do I do with that?

Atoms make material sense to me. I understand the constituent parts, I understand their interaction. They seem real, not imagined, not a mathematical construct. I understand basic classical physics. I have a fairly good grasp of quantum physics, at least the fundamentals. (Non-locality? Not so much. String theory? Ehhhhhh…) Then I get to magnetism.

What the hell is magnetism?

“Produced by moving electrical charges, especially spinning electrons. Works over distance without direct contact. Exerts a force.” Yeah, that is no help. Magnetism involves magnetic fields, and here we go again. What the hell is a field? “In physics, a field refers to a region in space (or spacetime) where each point is associated with a physical quantity. This quantity can vary from point to point and is used to describe forces or influences that act over a distance.” Well, that clears it up. And when an electrical charge disturbs an electrical field, that produces a magnetic field. Very helpful.

My brain knows that all of this is an effective way to model what our universe is and explain how it works. It’s all an intellectual infrastructure that aligns with physical reality in immensely useful ways. My brain knows that magnetism and energy and the wind exist and how they are defined, but my mind throws up its hands and says, I can grasp the Higgs boson, it’s real to me, but the Higgs field? That’s 100 percent mystery. That’s magic.

And that’s fine. More than fine. Forget my earlier use of the phrase “low-grade brood.” I love what I can’t yet comprehend, but imagine I might, someday. I think each of us embodies animating forces that move us to get out of bed, that foster our daily intent. Two of mine are beauty and mystery. Every day I want to experience and create something beautiful, and every day I want to stand bewildered before something that doesn’t make a lick of sense. The mystery of fields and moving energy and the way that there are patterns to the flow of air through beach grass impel me to take one more volume of popular physics down from my bookshelf and see if Brian Greene or Michio Kaku or Janna Levin or Carlo Rovelli or Kip Thorne can clear up a few things. I live in a mystery field, which is no less real just because I can’t begin to explain it.

The Hebrew word for grace, which I’ve seen Anglicized as khen and chen, evokes a sense of an unmerited gift from God that brings delight. We didn’t earn it, but we’ve been given it—grace from the divine. The Greek charis, an ancestor of the English “grace,” also refers to divine favor. We can’t explain it, but it’s real and it’s right there before our eyes.

Savor it. You can always try to figure it out later.

Coda

There are indeed equations that describe a breeze moving through beach grass. There are different ways to account for the resemblance to surface waves, the elasticity of the grass, and periodic changes in wind speed. The latter is sometimes caused by a type of vortex called Kámán vortex streets. I have no idea what that is, but I love the name. And the fact that it involves something called “vortex shedding.” I picture that on a black sweater. Quite the mess.

Anyway, one can apply equations from dynamic simulation models that consider bending force and twisting force. And one can apply wind field modeling that incorporates mean wind velocity and turbulent wind velocity.

And one must never forget the atmospheric boundary layer influence.

I don’t know how to render equations on this platform—lots of tricky symbols and subscripts and superscripts—but I prefer the mysterious terminology anyway. I’ll trade the clarity and precision of the equations for some time spent living on Kámán Vortex Street.