Name: Beauty, truth and ... physics?
Uploaded: 2007-12-06T09:00:00Z
Duration: 15 min 48 s
Description: Armed with a sense of humor and laypeople's terms, Nobel winner Murray Gell-Mann drops some knowledge on TEDsters about particle physics, asking questions like, Are elegant equations more likely to be right than inelegant ones?

Armed with a sense of humor and laypeople's terms, Nobel winner Murray Gell-Mann drops some knowledge on TEDsters about particle physics, asking questions like, Are elegant equations more likely to be right than inelegant ones?

Beauty, truth and ... physics?

Nature’s fundamental laws, from gravity to electromagnetism, reveal a striking simplicity and elegance. Theories that appear beautiful—expressed in concise mathematics—often turn out to describe reality even when experiments initially disagree. This self-similarity across scales, like peeling an onion, helps scientists edge closer to a unified understanding of matter. The beauty in physics arises not from human minds, but from the universe itself.