Over-simplification is an issue that bothers me. I sometimes need SMEs to explain a new field/concept to me in excruciating detail so that I understand it well enough to start writing about it, but I don’t always include the same level of detail in what I write, because I know/expect that the intended audience is starting from a greater level of understanding than I did.
Wikiquote suggests that “Make things as simple as possible, but not simpler”, a quote popularly attributed to Einstein, is itself a simplification of “It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.”
The simplified version may be snappier and more user-friendly for most of us today, but the original, which appears in Einstein’s 1933 Herbert Spencer Lecture “On the Method of Theoretical Physics”, was simple enough for the intended audience. And that’s kind of the point.
Continue reading “As simple as possible…”