What is your favorite deep, elegant, or beautiful explanation?

It's the 2012 Edge question. I quickly went through the responses (almost two hundreds so far) and tried to track how often some big shots were cited. In my record, Einstein gets the highest score, followed closely by Darwin and Watson & Crick, in a tie. Turing beats Feynman and gets a rather striking draw with both Maxwell and quantum theory. Other noticeable mentions include Herbert Simon, the Pascal-Fermat correspondence, and, oh well, Marcel Duchamp. Believe it or not, one even finds a vote for structural realism! And M-Phi proper also gets its share, I guess, with Russell's theory of descriptions. Nice.

Comments

  1. I count Galileo as beating out Turing, Feynman and Maxwell.

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  2. What about Foucault´s pendulum?

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