#think-elegant: minimalism
This is the second article of the #think-elegant series. Check out the first one: choose vigor over rigor should you be interested to know more.
Minimalism in thinking, coding, and writing has been praised by millions. In this article, I will mainly quote/paraphrase esteemed scientists and philosophers, and to talk about the aesthetic beauty of simplicity.
If a thing can be done adequately by means of one, it is superfluous to do it by means of several; for we observe that nature does not employ two instruments where one suffices (Aquinas, Basic Writings of St. Thomas Aquinas, p. 129).
By the definition of simplicity in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, there are two kinds of simplicities insight:
- Syntactic simplicity, a.k.a. elegance, refers to the number and complexity of hypotheses
- Ontological simplicity, a.k.a. Parsimony, refers to the number and complexity of things postulated. Ontological simplicity is often known as the Occam’s Razor principle.
Newton’s Laws of Motion perfectly embody both the syntactic and ontological simplicity. More specifically, there are just three syntactically simple laws, e.g. F = ma as the second law. By the way, you will never find the 67th law of Newton because it would simply be too complex and too many. All three laws are based on a small number of simple assumptions, i.e. they are ontologically simple. The #think-elegant series should apply both syntactic and ontological simplicity in designing its primitives.
Sir Isaac Newton includes a principle of parsimony as one of his three ‘Rules of Reasoning in Philosophy’ at the beginning of Book III of Principia Mathematica (1687):
Rule I: We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances.
Another quote by Albert Einstein
The grand aim of all science…is to cover the greatest possible number of empirical facts by logical deductions from the smallest possible number of hypotheses or axioms (Einstein, quoted in Nash 1963, p. 173).
At last, an apology for the long letter as above, as
“If I had longer time, I would have written a shorter letter”
