a rose by any other name

I don't know why, but I was thinking about beauty today. What prompted it was looking at some of the images of nebulae etc, data translated from non-visual wavelengths to visual light by some (probably linear given that wavelength is a linear scale, isn't it?) transformation. Anyway, it got me thinking.

Questions:
1. I find these images of the nebulae etc beautiful. But they aren't something I or anyone can ever see, because they were just produced by a mathematical transformation of a bunch of numbers recorded by light-sensitive instruments. They aren't originally in the visual spectrum at all.
What is it that I find beautiful about these pictures: the visual representation, the underlying relationships that create the mathematical form of the data?

2. Say that someone took the most beautiful math in the world and used a transformational process to come up with numbers that could be translated into the auditory spectrum.
If the music sounded hideous, would you still listen to it? Would it be beautiful? What about if it was beautiful music? What would make it beautiful: the beauty of the underlying mathematics, or the beauty of the auditory representation, or the beauty of the idea of the 'artist'/'mathematician' who carried out the transformation?

3. Take for example the IUPAC pictures I enjoy making (see my last post which is wrong by the way; it should be 2-butanol not 3-butanol).
Are they beautiful? (I think they are.) What makes them beautiful? Is it the representation you see when you draw out the structures? The underlying IUPAC formula? The creativity of using chemical reactions to draw?

4. What about abstract art. For instance there's this painting I like at the MFA. The painting isn't that great, but it's supposed to be a painting of life, from birth to death.
Does knowing the artist's interpretation of the painting make it more beautiful? Does having your own interesting subjective interpretation of the painting make it beautiful, or does it have to be intentional from the artist? Could an ugly painting be beautiful if it is based on an interesting idea?

It seems there are instances of purely aesthetic beauty (ie I am obsessed with beautiful, harmonious chord transitions), which is subjective but mostly agreed upon. But these examples I've given are I think way more subjective interpretations of beauty. For me, I have a gut feeling for all of them, but it may be different from yours. In these examples I've given, you have to know more than the superficial or the aesthetic to fully grasp the situation (ie you have to know the music is from beautiful math, the pictures are from chemical reactions, the art is based on such and such idea, etc). My best friend in high school argued with me about this a lot. I found that learning more about the world and the causation between things made it more beautiful to me (knowing cosmology basics has made the universe infinitely beautiful to me). My friend is a violin performance major. An example of our disagreement is that I like Mahler even though he's not particularly pretty because the psychology behind his music is very interesting, while she likes Mendelssohn because he wrote pretty music. Another example is that I find music amazing because it is just one physical manifestation of a more ubiquitous phenomenon: wave vibrations, harmonics, etc. But if I tried to tell her about that, she'd get pissed off at me and tell me I was ruining it for her. It seemed I could at least see her aesthetic point of view (like with my chord transitions), but knowing the science/story behind things didn't enhance her perception of beauty at all. It was mostly face-value.

Just some stuff to think about. Now I really must go back to reading about the cosmic microwave background... test tomorrow on the math of the radiation dominated era of our universe and nucleosynthesis as well as the incorporation of the vacuum energy/cosmological constant.

Interesting ideas for the day:
1. I think it's bumblebees or something that can actual see in infrared. Trying to imagine seeing in infrared (or seeing another color) is like thinking about having multiple dimensions of time and three spacial dimensions, or a third sex. It doesn't mesh well. There are just these mental blockades. What I find is interesting is that the principles that go into these things are all quite conceivable; it's just the result that we can't seem to fathom.

2. To God (or a hypothetical being capable of observing our universe from another dimension of sorts), the universe must look mostly like a fractal. It's almost entirely homogeneous and isotropic (non-uniformities arising from quantum fluctuations and inflation). Thus, given that God is sufficiently far away from everything, or in another dimension or something, our spacial universe looks like a ?3? dimensional fractal of nested spheres (orbits swept out overtime). Planets revolve around stars, stars revolve around galaxy centers, and it's all homogeneous so it has to look the same the closer and farther you look (until you get to a distance small enough to show anistropies etc). Kind of a pretty idea. Probably wrong, but interesting.