3 ms·
What passes the bar for "elegant enough"? Why would laws of nature care about such human principles? And, most of all, why treat elegance as a guiding princip
by willis936 3y ago
What passes the bar for "elegant enough"? Why would laws of nature care about such human principles? And, most of all, why treat elegance as a guiding principle when all it has done is produce models incapable of being accurate outside a narrow range?
- JKCalhoun 3y agoHistorically, haven't the more "elegant" models been shown to be correct? The various explanations for planetary motion come to mind as an example.
- willis936 3y agoCorrect in a narrow range. Newton's elegance failed to accurately predict orbits of even our rather typical stellar system. Good for a start, but hardly something to strive for once we know better. So where do we go next? There is a real chance of artificially keeping ourselves in a local minimum if we don't seriously consider inelegant theories. It'd be neat if someone came up with an elegant theory that accurately described nature from quantum fields to stars. It'd also be neat if someone did that with an inelegant theory.
- vaidhy 3y agoNo.. In fact by the standards of the day, an circular orbit is more elegant. Think about circles within circles and the entire universe revolving around you. To some extent, models that made less assumptions tend to be more correct.. but I think those are few and far between. We are now trying to explain very small discrepancies (by human scale) and the models are necessarily more complex.
- JKCalhoun 3y agoI was thinking of the epicycle in fact. Kind of a hack, I think.
- dexwiz 3y agoElegance is matter of perspective. Epicycles are a very elegant way to explain planetary orbits from a geocentric view point, but they are very wrong.
- JKCalhoun 3y agoI would agree epicycles are elegant — if they worked. :-)
- LudwigNagasena 3y agoEpicycles can’t be wrong per se, they can approximate any continuous movement. That is what makes it "curve fitting" and "inelegant".
- blackbear_ 3y agoBut that could just be a consequence of biases in the scientific process, right? After all phenomena that can be explained by simple/elegant theories are found, the remaining unexplained phenomena can only be explained by complicated/inelegant theories.