'Museums house beautifully crafted scientific instruments and equipment from the past because we can appreciate their aesthetic features. The phenomena we study in the experimental setup – such as copper sulphate crystals, rainbows produced by prisms, and the microscopic structure of cells – can be beautiful too. But what made Foucault’s pendulum a beautiful experiment is more than its visual beauty. Far more importantly, it showed the effects of Earth’s rotation, something important that hadn’t been demonstrated before, and it did this in a clever, imaginative and elegant way. The pendulum itself was beautiful, but the ultimate beauty of the experiment is a combination of its significance and its design.'

https://aeon.co/essays/when-is-a-scientific-experiment-like-a-beautiful-work-of-art