It Is More Important To Have Beauty

It Seems That If One Is Working From The Point Of View Of Getting Beauty In One's Equations, And If One Has Really A Sound Insight, One Is On A Sure Line Of Progress.

If You Are Receptive And Humble, Mathematics Will Lead You By The Hand. Again And Again, When I Have Been At A Loss How To Proceed, I Have Just Had To Wait Until I Have Felt The Mathematics Led Me By The Hand. It Has Led Me Along An Unexpected Path, A Path Where New Vistas Open Up, A Path Leading To New Territory, Where One Can Set Up A Base Of Operations, From Which One Can Survey The Surroundings And Plan Future Progress.

Just By Studying Mathematics We Can Hope To Make A Guess At The Kind Of Mathematics That Will Come Into The Physics Of The Future... If Someone Can Hit On The Right Lines Along Which To Make This Development, It May Lead To A Future Advance In Which People Will First Discover The Equations And Then, After Examining Them, Gradually Learn How To Apply Them... My Own Belief Is That This Is A More Likely Line Of Progress Than Trying To Guess At Physical Pictures.

It Is More Important To Have Beauty In One's Equations Than To Have Them Fit Experiment... It Seems That If One Is Working From The Point Of View Of Getting Beauty In One's Equations, And If One Has Really A Sound Insight, One Is On A Sure Line Of Progress. If There Is Not Complete Agreement Between The Results Of One's Work And Experiment, One Should Not Allow Oneself To Be Too Discouraged, Because The Discrepancy May Well Be Due To Minor Features That Are Not Properly Taken Into Account And That Will Get Cleared Up With Further Developments Of The Theory.

It Was Not Until Some Weeks Later That I Realized There Is No Need To Restrict Oneself To 2 By 2 Matrices. One Could Go On To 4 By 4 Matrices, And The Problem Is Then Easily Soluable. In Retrospect, It Seems Strange That One Can Be So Much Held Up Over Such An Elementary Point. The Resulting Wave Equation For The Electron Turned Out To Be Very Successful. It Led To Correct Values For The Spin And The Magnetic Moment. This Was Quite Unexpected. The Work All Followed From A Study Of Pretty Mathematics, Without Any Thought Being Given To These Physical Properties Of The Electron.