Spencer Smith

Professor Spencer Smith finds aesthetic beauty in physics

Professor Spencer Smith finds aesthetic beauty in physics

“I grew up in a family that valued art a lot — my father is an art historian — so I get nostalgic when I go to museums and churches. … I grew up being immersed in that world,” Spencer Smith, assistant professor of physics at Mount Holyoke College, explained in an interview with Mount Holyoke News. “When it [comes] to physics, it seems completely different [from art]. … But how I initially got into physics was from an aesthetic point of view. … I saw aspects of physics that I thought are aesthetically beautiful. You can think of this in terms of symmetries, [like the] Principle of Simplicity, or you can … [think of] the complexity that can come out of very simple systems,” Smith said.