What I dreamed of reading Arthur C Clarke and Asimov growing up. These Raptor engines in the Elon Musk video are one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen and I don't know why. I am an artist so light years from any plumbing... But the plumbing has integral beauty to it I can't pinpoint.
Inherent beauty.
My parents were engineers with three Master's degrees among them, and my dad was a manufacturing engineer and the CTO of a large company. One of my grandfathers was an inventor with a silver medal from the London exhibition from 1907 and a street named after him, my other grandfather - Marin, who I was named after - was an architect, a painter, draftsman, a businessman, and a genius in my opinion.
I've always had great respect for math, technology and engineering although I was not a good mathematician. I went to mathematical high School but math just wasn't my thing, but drawing was.
I went to architectural School where I constantly annoyed my professors with insane sculptures that were supposed to be buildings.
In my book Art Life and Video Games I have a chapter that speaks to the fact that every great artist in history has been a great engineer of their work as well. Every artist that has had an impact has paid great attention to all the technical aspects of the execution.
But I still can't figure out in what way these raptor engines are beautiful. I have a very very old drawing that really reminds me of these engines and I must dig it up from someplace.
It really is a great and very nice conundrum to think about, is there inherent beauty or is it all in the eye of the beholder? Would, say, Michelangelo be as fascinated? I'm sure Leonardo would be stoked.
Entropy
Recently I was reading an article or more like listening to an article about quantum phenomena and time and the physicist was saying that time really is only either increasing or decreasing of entropy.
So I think that entropy and the control of entropy and whipping entropy into some sort of anti-enthropic construct has something to do with beauty.
Because we could almost instantaneously tell order from disorder. We could instantly tell if something is orderly versus something is messy. There are orders of magnitude to the control of entropy.
The lower order of control of entropy would be simple order, like stacking boxes, the higher order of control of entropy would be engineering, and the ultimate balance of, and the tip of the blade of entropy control, would be art.