If the whole thing caught on fire and burned like oily rags all the way to the singed cinders of the original foundation, it would still be marvelous to look at, beautiful for the sheer sake of its dance. The way some acts of destruction are beautiful in the way they devastate. You tell me that things like two plus two equals four are beautiful because they’re wholesome. Whereas, E=mc² doesn’t mean anything until applied to a wondrous universe expanding wide wise across a celestial stage.
          Beauty, for some, is practicality: a watch with a calculator, a car that tells you what’s wrong with it, a self-cleaning oven. For instance, you say, a square is beautiful, but a cube even more so. Anything in between is considered non-committal and, consequently, not beautiful.
          What about Planck’s constant? I ask.
          Not beautiful, you say.
          Brownian motion?
          Beautiful in its contributions to other beauty.
          Platonic solids?
          Uselessly beautiful. Though it would break Kepler’s heart to hear it.
          Gleick’s physics of chaos?
          Disturbingly beautiful.
          Relativity?
          Awesomely beautiful. So beautiful it hurts.
          Everything has a breaking point, you say. A point of matter disintegration. Decay. Dispersal.
          It’s what I find beautiful, that everything has a breaking point, a potential to be broken, break down, break away, break for good. That everything, if not now, then at some definite point in the future, is vulnerable in integrity, and no mathematics, no matter how pure or wholesome, can ever save it.
          Break away, chaotic world, break away.

Aaron Hellem