What is the most beautiful physics or math equation?
Beauty is obviously a subjective metric, but that has not stopped many scientific publications, including Cosmos, from attempting to rank great equations by their sheer jaw-dropping beauty.
A more comfortable and familiar mode of ranking for scientifically minded people is the notion of “elegance.”
An “elegant” equation is one that captures an abundance of complex information and describes it in a relatively simple way.
Science history books will sometimes describe the long reflections and intellectual twists and turns that great thinkers like Einstein labored through as they tried to solve the problems they saw around them, and to describe the processes of the physical world.
When the equation finally came to a person like Einstein or Newton, it was tight and tidy, like a gleaming mineral extracted from a dark mine of confusion. It was all the more impressive because many thinkers had descended into that mine and emerged empty-handed.
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