Well, In The First Place, It Leads

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.

One Could Perhaps Describe The Situation By Saying That God Is A Mathematician Of A Very High Order, And He Used Very Advanced Mathematics In Constructing The Universe.

It Is More Important To Have Beauty In One's Equations Than To Have Them Fit Experiment.

A Good Deal Of My Research In Physics Has Consisted In Not Setting Out To Solve Some Particular Problem, But Simply Examining Mathematical Equations Of A Kind That Physicists Use And Trying To Fit Them Together In An Interesting Way, Regardless Of Any Application That The Work May Have. It Is Simply A Search For Pretty Mathematics. It May Turn Out Later To Have An Application. Then One Has Good Luck. At Age 78.

The Physicist, In His Study Of Natural Phenomena, Has Two Methods Of Making Progress: (1) The Method Of Experiment And Observation, And (2) The Method Of Mathematical Reasoning. The Former Is Just The Collection Of Selected Data; The Latter Enables One To Infer Results About Experiments That Have Not Been Performed. There Is No Logical Reason Why The Second Method Should Be Possible At All, But One Has Found In Practice That It Does Work And Meets With Reasonable Success.