Price: ₹399
Pages: 432
ISBN: 9780062230171
What is your favorite deep, elegant, or beautiful explanation?
This is the question John Brockman, publisher of Edge. org ("The world's smartest website" –The Guardian), posed to 150 of the world brightest and most influential minds. Scientists' greatest pleasure comes from theories that derive the solution to some deep puzzle from a small set of simple principles in a surprising way. These explanations are called "beautiful" or "elegant". Historical examples are Kepler's explanation of complex planetary motions as simple ellipses, Bohr's explanation of the periodic table of the elements in terms of electron shells and Watson and Crick's double helix. Einstein famously said that he did not need experimental confirmation of his general theory of relativity because it "was so beautiful it had to be true. "......