PAUL DIRAC wanted to be seduced, and he wasn't afraid to admit it. In a 1963 essay recalling his role in discovering the strange-but-true laws of quantum theory, he wrote "it is more important to have beauty in one's equations than to have them fit experiment". That might sound odd. Experiment, after all, is the ultimate arbiter of an equation's ability to explain natural phenomena. But for a theoretical physicist like Dirac, experiments could be misled: only beauty was incorruptible.
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