Comments on: Your Favorite Deep, Elegant, or Beautiful Explanation

By: JoeTurpin

JoeTurpin — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 13:26:02 +0000

The first definition given in Euclid’s Elements of Geometry: “A point is that which has no part”

By: BobC

BobC — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 21:18:57 +0000

Sean,

I’ve been working my way through Edge’s Deep/Elegant/Beautiful list, and about 20% of the entries have made me pause to learn more. There is lots of beauty and elegance out there, and my main ‘take-away’ so far is how lucky we are to be able to perceive and delight in it.

Also, ‘deep’ has new meaning for me. It used to be synonymous with ‘difficult’ or ‘obscure’. Now I see Deep as meaning ‘revealing’. A truly equal peer with Beauty and Elegance when defining the degree of satisfaction we feel concerning our attempts to explain our world.

I’m about half-way through now. Yes, it’s been weeks. But it seems things keep getting more interesting the further I go. A wonderful journey with many surprises along the way. My favorite surprise so far must be the results of combining statistics and graph theory with gastronomy. (No names or links: Look for it!) That simply tickled my brain in all the right places, and makes me want to be more adventurous in the kitchen.

Thanks!

By: David Brown

David Brown — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 16:02:36 +0000

I have two candidates for deep, elegant, or beautiful explanation. In probability theory, one explanation of data is the “Law of Large Numbers”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_large_numbers
In the philosophy of measurement, one explanation of measurement is the “Law of Stray Numbers”. This law has been elegantly expressed by Shawn Achor as, “We know that’s a measurement error because it’s messing up my data.”
http://www.ted.com/talks/shawn_achor_the_happy_secret_to_better_work.html

By: Ben

Ben — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 00:59:49 +0000

I am not shure I have one.

But I can pronounce a couple of questions.

Can – theoretically- the strings or gravitones be the same as the dark energy dARK matter, if they were the first matter that scattered out from the BB- event and could they work as a “forcefield” pulling bringing the clumsier “ordinary mass” to or from its end station position?

By: Elliot Tarabour

Elliot Tarabour — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 03:19:04 +0000

My vote is for Shannon’s information theory.

By: Ahmed

Ahmed — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 04:57:45 +0000

Rolf Landaur’s explanation of why (and how) information is physical. Nothing is more intriguing to me than the eerie relation between something we used to think of as a product of our own reflective recognition and categorization of patterns, and the very real and unmistakable flow of energy.

By: Gizelle Janine

Gizelle Janine — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 15:55:44 +0000

I really loved that I saw the scientific method on here.

Underappreciated and taken for granted, me thinks.

-__-

By: sjn

sjn — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 19:47:03 +0000

I second #12 and #20: Least Action and Noether’s theorem.

By: Jimbo

Jimbo — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 14:55:40 +0000

Debra: I think its much more beautifully Sung, by Joni Mitchell in her `Woodstock’, beating Sagan by ~10yrs: “We’re StarDust…We are billion yr-old Carbon, & we got to get ourselves back to the garden”.

By: Debra Leddon

Debra Leddon — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 06:20:59 +0000

My favorite is the one liner mentioend by Carl Sagan years ago; “we are all ‘star-stuff’”. It’s a very simple but powerful statement of how a collapsing star creates the heavy atoms needed for life and for the rocky planets on which life exists (that we know of). There’s more to say on this but it is best said by Sagan himself in an episode of ‘Cosmos’.

By: Jimbo

Jimbo — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 05:23:32 +0000

As beautiful as GR is, don’t we suspect that a Deeper underlying source for its differential geometric formulation is in fact thermodynamics ? Einstein himself mused that,
“Thermodynamics is the only physical theory of universal content which will never be overthrown”.
Hawking, Ted Jacobson, T. Padmanabhan, & E.Verlinde have shown such connections underlie the esoteric math of gravity/differential geometry, & empower it with the physical reality of heat. Thus the synergy of the two manifests from cosmology to coffee cup.

By: chas

chas — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 02:47:52 +0000

It belongs in the future ; it will be in the proof of Goldbach’s Conjecture : ‘Every even
number is the sum of two prime numbers ‘ .

By: Peter

Peter — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 02:27:03 +0000

Me too for Noether’s theorem.

By: Justin Loe

Justin Loe — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 22:53:30 +0000

Nonlocality. Clearly nonlocality is counterintuitive to everyday experience and there have been many speculative books for an amateur audience on this topic. Alain Aspect seems to have confirmed nonlocality as an explanation for quantum phenomena but it is fundamentally unclear what this means. In a sense then, this is an explanation that opens up a whole series of additional puzzles that contradict the usual commonsense intuitions with which we perceive everyday phenomena.

By: rww

rww — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 21:13:54 +0000

Feynman posed a similar question in his Einstein lectures (Six Easy Pieces, ch 1):

“If in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generation of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words?”

“That all things are made of atoms” was his reply.

By: Dave

Dave — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 04:52:05 +0000

Noether’s theorem. I’ve always found how it explains the conservation (or even existence) of the notion called energy, momentum, etc. in terms of symmetries particularly beautiful.

By: Jeff

Jeff — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 22:40:33 +0000

My favorite was always the proof, by the Pythagorean theorem, of the time dilation formula of special relativity, based on the assumption that the speed of light is invariant. This is based on using a clock that “ticks” each time a beam of light bounces between two mirrors, where the two mirrors are each parallel to the direction of motion. For a moving clock, the beam of light makes a zigzag pattern and the Pythagorean theorem can be used to determine the length of each diagonal leg of the zigzag — viola, the time dilation formula!

By: Sam Gralla

Sam Gralla — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 19:39:36 +0000

The equivalence principle is a healthy #2, but of course #1 is Newton’s realization that apples fall and planets orbit for the same reason. The concept of the same force causing both “linear” and “circular” motion is amazingly unintuitive (as well as deep, elegant, and beautiful).

By: Eunoia

Eunoia — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 19:15:08 +0000

Greulich on Mass :-
http://www.fli-leibniz.de/www_kog/index.html

By: Francois Demers

Francois Demers — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 18:57:33 +0000

Hackneyed, overdone but still: E=MC squared. Explains the relationship of matter to energy. Elegant in its economy of means for the vast domain it explains. Deep in its extraodinary impact on modern physics.

For pure elgance, Euler’s postulate.