The Beauty of Equations

I was walking home from class today when a memory from the play Picasso at the Lapin Agile drifted into thoughts. The play focuses on the chance meeting of Picasso and Einstein in a French bar. The memory that caught my attention was of a scene in that play. Picasso and Einstein are told to “draw” like in a spaghetti western; however, instead of guns blazing, they eagerly begin to scribble down on pieces of paper. As you may have guessed Picasso made a sketch and Einstein wrote down an equation. Picasso then says to Einstein “that’s not art; it’s just a bunch of numbers.”

People don’t seem to appreciate equations the same way they might a painting or sculpture. In my opinion an elegant equation is much more beautiful than any work of art. Equations represent the toiling of several generations of great minds. An artist may spend years perfecting their technique or finishing a masterpiece, but scientists spend hundreds of years fine tuning a single variable. When decades and decades of data can be phrased in a simple equation it is a thing of beauty.

Just today in cosmology the professor was going over the thermal history of the universe. You may say to yourself *yawn* but I was on the edge of my seat the entire time. I imagined electrons and positrons colliding endlessly in huge plasma. Particles clumping together into cosmic cookie dough and being smeared out by gravity into galaxies. All these things can be inferred by simple equations that stretch a single line.

An artist is measured by how effectively/ originally he depicts a scene, an emotion, a thought, etc. He is only as precise as his oils and canvas. A scientist with a simple equation can perfectly describe the workings of the universe. What brush stroke can compare with that.