Listening to Beauty: Rhetorics of Science in Sea and Sound

A moving study of how encounters with beauty advance scientific discovery.

Our attempts to understand the world are always more than simply rational. Our bodies learn through lived experience, our natural environments challenge what we think we know, and we take lessons from our nonhuman kin. Even scientists, often considered paragons of rationality, frequently describe their findings in the language of beauty. For rhetorician Megan Poole, beauty is integral to how scientific research works.

Drawing on interviews with leading biologists, Poole explores what happens when scientists set aside objectivity and listen for beauty around them. The wonder we feel at the plumage of birds, the melodies of whales, or the caretaking of elephants may not help us (on its own) to isolate a given fact, but such encounters may teach us to open ourselves to a different way of knowing entirely. Through stories about researchers’ encounters with wonder, Listening to Beauty reveals how scientific discovery happens sometimes unsystematically, sometimes incoherently, often beautifully.

Megan Poole is assistant professor of rhetoric and writing at the University of Texas at Austin.