Beauty is one of those tricky concepts to define because although most of us have an intuitive sense of instances of beauty, and can usually recognize it when we see it, we can't come up with an overarching theory about why all the things we consider to be beautiful are considered beautiful while other things are not.Still, one thing about which many people agree is that science and philosophy strip the world of beauty by reducing it to a bunch of cold, abstract theories and equations. But as the late Richard Feynman makes clear in the following stunning video (which is itself an excerpt from the documentary The Pleasure of Finding Things Out), that prejudice is based on a embarrassing mischaracterization of the nature and the motivation behind serious investigation.
I know exactly what you're thinking... tell me I'm wrong :)