Listening to Beauty - by Megan Poole

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"Poole's writing brings her method of embodied listening with scientists and whale song vividly to life, where the rhythms of these relations become deeply felt and shared. She transports the reader into her conversations with scientists as they describe their practices of 'punctive listening' and their aesthetic relations with the earth and with whales. In this way, Listening to Beauty expands both the practices and the sense of possibilities for what listening and science are, and what they can become."--Bridie McGreavy, University of Maine

"Poole's work is a powerful reminder that we still need books: longform, carefully inflected material that can make us feel differently at the end. Listening to Beauty is not just a timely argument or a new way forward methodologically--though it is those things as well. It is an event that redistributes the very sensorium it studies."--Daniel M. Gross, University of California, Irvine

About the Author

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