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ELEGANCE
October 30, 2009
February 17, 2010
Beauty as a guide to truth...
PRETTY_TRUE
The physicist Murray Gell-man,
gave a TED talk, where he
defined scientific elegance,
and tried to explain why it works.
Elegance means "you can write the
equations down briefly".
He makes the point that over time
the mathematic notation becomes
adjusted to better fit what people He shows Maxwell's
want to do with the mathematics. equations, going from
partial differential
equations to a linear
Elegance is predictive of success algebra form
of a physical theory, because (div/grad/curl), to a
we're constantly trying to push still tighter form
the theory from a known realm to invented by Einstein.
an "adjacent" unknown realm -- and
the math is similar for "adjacent"
layers.
He does not explain *why* the math is
similar in adjacent layers.
He seemed to be making an
assumption of "continuity" I suspect that the key is that
(as physicists often do). the "adjacency" of layers is
really determined by our
knowledge: we choose to push
into unknown territory that
seems to us as though it's close
to becoming known.
Is elegance another
name for "familiarity"?
A side-issue:
In Gell-man's view "physical law"
plus "accumulated accidents"
suffices to explain the universe
as emergent behavior.
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