SPARK @ Berlin Science Week

SPARK 11: "Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty"?

CONCERT 18-19h

SooJin Anjou, piano
Cicely Parnas, cello

Claude Debussy            Sonata for cello and piano (1915)

Wolfgang Köhler           Jazz Sonata for cello and piano (2022)*

                                           *world premiere

DISCUSSION 19.15 - 20.15h

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty"?

In times of uncertainty, imagination is easily lost to urgency. Yet it is precisely now that we must ask: what lies beyond the immediate, and how can beauty help us see it? 

Many scientists and mathematicians have expressed the view that the hallmark of a correct solution is elegance and beauty. G.H. Hardy wrote in A Mathematician’s Apology (1940):“Beauty is the first test; there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics.” Physicist Paul Dirac asserted “It is more important to have beauty in one’s equations than to have them fit experiment.”

Meanwhile, artists of all disciplines –– music, visual arts, dance –– have, throughout the centuries, wrestled with questions of proportion, form and structure, which are mathematical concepts at heart.

As we look “beyond now” with Berlin Science Week 2025, we invite bold ideas that transcend disciplines. Can beauty become a language of science? Can science, in turn, be a source of beauty and hope?

With Cicely Parnas, Wolfgang Köhler, Georg Braune (medical student at Charité, researcher), Stefanie Grosswendt (systems biologist, research group leader at BIH and MDC-BIMSB)

Moderated by SooJin Anjou, Nikolaus Rajewsky