Pick A Flower On Earth And You

I Think It Is A Peculiarity Of Myself That I Like To Play About With Equations, Just Looking For Beautiful Mathematical Relations Which Maybe Don't Have Any Physical Meaning At All. Sometimes They Do. At Age 60.

What Makes The Theory Of Relativity So Acceptable To Physicists In Spite Of Its Going Against The Principle Of Simplicity Is Its Great Mathematical Beauty. This Is A Quality Which Cannot Be Defined, Any More Than Beauty In Art Can Be Defined, But Which People Who Study Mathematics Usually Have No Difficulty In Appreciating.

Renormalization Is Just A Stop-gap Procedure. There Must Be Some Fundamental Change In Our Ideas, Probably A Change Just As Fundamental As The Passage From Bohr's Orbit Theory To Quantum Mechanics. When You Get A Number Turning Out To Be Infinite Which Ought To Be Finite, You Should Admit That There Is Something Wrong With Your Equations, And Not Hope That You Can Get A Good Theory Just By Doctoring Up That Number.

It Is Quite Clear That Beauty Does Depend On One's Culture And Upbringing For Certain Kinds Of Beauty, Pictures, Literature, Poetry And So On...but Mathematical Beauty Is Of A Rather Different Kind. I Should Say Perhaps It Is Of A Completely Different Kind And Transcends These Personal Factors. It Is The Same In All Countries And At All Periods Of Time.

The Aim Of Science Is To Make Difficult Things Understandable In A Simpler Way; The Aim Of Poetry Is To State Simple Things In An Incomprehensible Way. The Two Are Incompatible.