“Physics is really nothing more than a search for ultimate simplicity, but so far all we have is a kind of elegant messiness.”
Source: A Short History of Nearly Everything
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Bill Bryson 112
American author 1951Related quotes
The Hemoglobin Molecule, Scientific American, <B>211</B>, 65-76, November 1964. This comment refers to the appeareace of the low resolution structure of hemoglobin, which Perutz was instrumental in elucidating in a heroic effort that spanned 1937 to 1959. In the course of this work, Perutz and his co-workers developed many of the techniques that are used to this day to determine the three-dimensional structures of macromolecules.
Source: Global Shift (2003) (Fourth Edition), Chapter 2, A New Geo-Economy, p. 14
in a NOVA interview Viewpoints on String Theory, Edward Witten http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/elegant/view-witten.html, July 2003.
Source: 1950s–1970s, Maximum Principles in Analytical Economics, 1970, p. 69
Context: There is really nothing more pathetic than to have an economist or a retired engineer try to force analogies between the concepts of physics and the concepts of economics. How many dreary papers have I had to referee in which the author is looking for something that corresponds to entropy or to one or another form of energy. Nonsensical laws, such as the law of conservation of purchasing power, represent spurious social science imitations of the important physical law of the conservation of energy; and when an economist makes reference to a Heisenberg Principle of indeterminacy in the social world, at best this must be regarded as a figure of speech or a play on words, rather than a valid application of the relations of quantum mechanics.
Arithmetica Universalis (1707), p.232
“Elegant as simplicity, and warm
As ecstasy.”
Source: Table Talk (1782), Line 588.
“The elegant simplicity of the three per cents.”
As quoted in Lives of the Lord Chancellors (1845) by John Campbell, Vol. x. Chap. 212; this precedes the use by Benjamin Disraeli of "The sweet simplicity of the three per cents", in Endymion (1880).
Source: On Building Systems That Will Fail (1991), p. 80
During his conversation with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams, as quoted in The Telegraph, in . In " Richard Dawkins: I can't be sure God does not exist http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion/9102740/Richard-Dawkins-I-cant-be-sure-God-does-not-exist.html"