Rethinking Scientific Elegance: When Complex Systems Require Billions of Parameters
By
seanlinehan
Slow-proofed and worth the wait. Worth its weight in flour.
Summary
The article explores the evolution of scientific understanding from mystical explanations to concise physical laws, and questions whether our assumption that good theories must be small and elegant is fundamentally correct. It suggests that as we tackle increasingly complex systems, the minimum viable compression might require billions of parameters rather than simple equations, challenging traditional notions of scientific elegance and simplicity.
Key quotes
· 3 pulledFor most of human history, the things we couldn't explain, we called mystical.
What's remarkable, in retrospect, is how terse those explanations turned out to be. F=ma. E=mc². PV=nRT.
We assumed good theories are small. But the minimum viable compression of a complex system might be billions of parameters large.
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