
Beauty Is Physics’ Secret Weapon - BIackSwan
http://nautil.us/issue/32/space/beauty-is-physics-secret-weapon
======
DonaldFisk
Dirac said something closely related to this: "... it is more important to
have beauty in one's equations than to have them fit experiment. ... It seems
that if one is working from the point of view of getting beauty in one's
equations, and if one has really a sound insight, one is on a sure line of
progress."

[http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/the-
evolution...](http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/the-evolution-of-
the-physicists-picture-of-nature/)

------
_yosefk
...and ugliness is software's!

~~~
DonaldFisk
Not necessarily.

Alan Kay: Yes, that was the big revelation to me when I was in graduate
school—when I finally understood that the half page of code on the bottom of
page 13 of the Lisp 1.5 manual was Lisp in itself. These were “Maxwell’s
Equations of Software!” This is the whole world of programming in a few lines
that I can put my hand over.

Lisp, and a few other languages including Smalltalk, were not so much designed
as discovered.

~~~
SilasX
Maxwell's equations of _side-effect-free_ software, yes, which doesn't
actually pay very well.

------
muddyrivers
So is math and engineering.

