Elegance in Science: The Beauty of Simplicity, Ian GlynnOxford U. Press, New York, 2010. $29.95 (271 pp.). ISBN 978-0-19-957862-7
As a graduate student of John Wheeler at the University of Texas at Austin, I remember overhearing a conversation between his office assistant and Steven Weinberg’s assistant. They were puzzled at what passed for elegance in the eyes of physicists. Apparently, typing up manuscripts on general relativity and quantum field theory left them incredulous that physics could be elegant!
Engaging in sophisticated debate about the nature of elegance and its relationship to truth isn’t the intent of Elegance in Science: The Beauty of Simplicity. Instead, author Ian Glynn, professor emeritus of physiology at the University of Cambridge, aims at a broad audience and presents examples of scientific inquiries that illustrate elegance in action—though often the elegance is left unstated. Many of those examples can be useful in...
