From The New Yorker, on elegance in science: "When the Stanford neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky (was asked) for a definition of elegant science, he said, 'You know it when you see it.' Edward Witten, a physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, was similarly cagey. 'After you define music for me, I will try to define elegance,' he said. Alyssa Goodman, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, answered more forthrightly: "There is something about the way things fit together, a kind of fluidity. If it is done right, and elegantly, you do not see all the individual parts, because they all fit together in a way that looks like a whole." She was talking, unfortunately, about tennis."
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