Beauty is More Important than Accuracy

I think that there is a moral to this story, namely that it is more important to have beauty in one's equations than to have them fit experiment. If Schroedinger had been more confident of his work, he could have published it some months earlier, and he could have published a more accurate equation .... 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. If there is not complete agreement between the results of one's work and experiment, one should not allow oneself to be too discouraged, because the discrepancy may well be due to minor features that are not properly taken into account and that will get cleared up with further developments of the theory.

Notes:

Interesting argument: beauty in an equation is more important than having it completely fit the reality.

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 Lectures on quantum field theory, 1964-1965
Books, Brochures, and Chapters>Book:  Dirac, Paul Adrien Maurice (196?), Lectures on quantum field theory, 1964-1965, Retrieved on 2014-01-22
  • Source Material [books.google.com]
  • Folksonomies: quantum field theory