Reminds me of the concept of "Quality" from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

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The simple elegant theory of a mechanical universe where the sun and planets revolve around the earth is wrong.

Is the good proessor willing to embrace the very simple and elegant theory that God made the earth and the heavens in 6 days and breathed life into a clump of dirt to produce Man?

A willingness to Believe does not a Proof make. (ooh ahh profound)

Simply believing really really hard that beauty and elegance are the indicators of correctness doesn't make it so.

And what happens when your definition of Simple and Elegant conflicts with mine? The loudest (or most trendy or most politically correct) voice wins?

you should never have needed to use a save on this.

He should stop saying "accidents" and start saying "interactions". Chance and accidents are imprecise words for series of causes and effects that are obscure enough to us to seem random.
-Karl

re: memorae

Can you predict future events based on the current state with your simple and elegant "theory"? The good professor provided evidence for his thesis in that we have several simple and elegant formulas that are useful for predicting actual results in the real world. And he mentions that simplicity is what he means when speaking about beauty and elegance. So, yes, people may have different views of what is beautiful but the important part is that theories that are simple seem to be correct.

-Karl

One of the worst talks on TED. What he says (or what he wants to say) is great, but the presentation is unbelievably badly executed. He is a nice guy and has some funny moments and I respect his age, but he speaks way to slow and his sheets contain way too long sentences, too much information to grasp and don't match what he is saying. I realise he as a scientist may not be used to present stuff like that, but compared just to the average TED talk I'd say he has a lot to learn. If he has the time to ;-)