Measuring the Marigolds: Difference between revisions

** [http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/o-sweet-spontaneous-v/ "o sweet spontaneous"] is more obviously and scathingly against this.

* In ''[[Discworld]]'' the Auditors fall into this whenever they're not trying to destroy things ''because'' they can't be measured using numbers. At one point they attempted to understand art by reducing a painting to powder and sifting through to find the bit of it that was the art.

* [[John Keats]], ''Lamia'':

{{quote|...Do not all charms fly

 

=== Anime and Manga ===

* In ''[[Yotsubato]]!'', Asagi shows Yotsuba that the ''tsukitsukiboushi'' making the onomatopoetic chirps heard in late-summer are cicadas, and not summer-ending fairies as she believed. Yotsuba, however is excited to learn something new, and eagerly spreads the word that [[Shaped Like Itself|cicadas are cicadas!]]

 

=== Fan Works ===

* ''[[Dept Heaven Apocrypha]]'' has [[Student Council President|Ledah]], a workaholic [[Super OCD|overachiever]] with [[The Stoic|all the apparent emotional capacity of a brick wall]]. Slowly, it's been revealed that this is more a result of his walled-in emotional problems and history of being abused than anything else, as he displays quite childish wonder at something so simple as realizing he has a friend.

** He's also like this in [[Riviera: The Promised Land|canon]], although the example is played rather straighter there. Interestingly, in both incarnations, Ledah is deeply religious.

 

=== Literature ===

* The short story ''Democritus's Violin'' is about this trope. An academic windbag gets angry at the main character for using science in an essay on Bach and she gets back at him by pulling a prank which [[Broken Aesop|(supposedly)]] proves that [[Family-Unfriendly Aesop|the world is strictly reductionist and any belief in the power of art is the product of a dim mind]]. Um, yay?

** In fact Ian Stewart, like most mathematicians, uses the word "beautiful" a ''lot''.

** A particularly well-executed proof is often referred to as 'elegant'.

* In [[Breakfast of Champions]], there's a scene where [[Makes Sense in Context|the author]] is attacked by a dog. Vonnegut spends two full pages on a ridiculously detailed and brilliantly dramatic explanation of what happens biochemically in his nervous system, body and brain from the time he sees the dog until he [[Crowning Moment of Awesome|jumps over a car]].

 

* In an episode of ''[[Sliders]]'', when an android explained to Wade why the sky is blue, and she found it romantic.

* Charlie Eppes in ''[[Numb3rs]]'' is a math genius who sees incredible and fascinating beauty in how mathematics helps describe the world.

 

=== Meta ===

* As said above, some claim that [[Tropes Will Ruin Your Life|spending too much time on this site will make you jaded and unable to appreciate a work in any medium by automatically dissecting and analyzing it]]. However, [[Tropes Will Enhance Your Life (Sugar Wiki)|not only can you get involved in a film's plot, you can have more fun on the way guessing which trope is going to be put into action before it does so.]]

** And better, it gives you the tools to analyze and explain to others why you liked or did not like a piece rather than relying on "Eh, I just didn't like it."

 

=== Music ===

* ''Tom Glazer'' wrote "Why Does The Sun Shine? (The Sun Is a Mass of Incandescent Gas)" in 1959. The long-forgotten song was later covered by ''[[They Might Be Giants (band)|They Might Be Giants]]'' for their children's educational CD "Here Comes Science", along with an updated song, "Why Does the Sun Really Shine? (The Sun is a Miasma of Incandescent Plasma)". Justified in that these songs are meant to both educate and entertain, ([[Crowning Music of Awesome|and do both splendidly]]).

* As a judge on [[The Sing-Off]], [[Ben Folds]] is enjoying the show on more levels than the rest of us as he elaborates the exact technical merits of each performance. He looks giddy as he explains how the three-part harmony comes together or points out the arrangement of events every four to eight bars.

 

=== Web Comics ===

* Of course, ''[[xkcd]]'' is a complete inversion of this, which often talks of math and science with an infectious sense of awe and giddiness, demonstrated [http://xkcd.com/877/ here].

* Clinton from ''[[Questionable Content]]'' also inverts it, arguing that you can't truly appreciate the marigolds until you've measured them.

 

=== Web Original ===

* Inverted by the [http://symphonyofscience.com/ Symphonies of Science] which are pretty much nothing but various scientists [[Squee|gushing]] about how awesome the world and its mechanics are, [[Auto-Tune]]d and set to music.

* [[Eliezer Yudkowsky]] argues against it under the title, "[http://lesswrong.com/lw/oo/explaining_vs_explaining_away/ Explaining vs. Explaining Away], with some follow up notes on taking [http://lesswrong.com/lw/or/joy_in_the_merely_real/ Joy in the "Merely" Real].

 

=== Western Animation ===

* The 90s ''[[Spider-Man: The Animated Series]]'' made Peter a subversion of this [[Trope]] - for instance, when he's on a Ferris wheel, Mary Jane asks how fireworks work, at which point he goes into a talk on the fuses and the gunpowder and the doping with trace metals and so on. When Mary-Jane comments that he's taken the romance out of them by analyzing them, Peter points out that knowing how they work doesn't make them any less beautiful. [[Chekhov's Gun|She would later use the knowledge to create a makeshift distress signal.]]

* The Disney cartoon ''[[Donald Duck]] in Mathemagic Land'' is an attempt to avert this. Despite Donald's insistence that advanced mathematics is for "eggheads", a [[Narrator|disembodied "Spirit of Adventure"]] manages to convince him otherwise by showing how math influences things like parlor games and music theory.

 

=== Real Life ===

* Just ask any scientist about their field of specialty, and the ''last'' thing you'll get is a roboticly dull answer. Try asking a botanist about flowers, or an astronomer about galaxies. These people chose these fields in the first place because they feel intensely about them. You don't get rich researching science. It is, almost of necessity, a labor of love.

** Hell, ask a ''mathematician'' about their work, aka "[[Everybody Hates Mathematics|the dullest thing in existence]]", and you're likely to get a whole lot of enthusiasm and excitement.

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Romanticism Versus Enlightenment]]

[[Category:Characterization Tropes]]

[[Category:Double Standard]]

[[Category:Alliterative Trope Titles]]