'Nature, For Which We Have No Code'

"One of my reasons for being optimistic is that the foundations of nature are simple.

This was brought home to me many years ago when I joined the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton. I did this in the hope that by rubbing elbows with those great atomic physicists and mathematicians I would learn something about living matters.

But as soon as I revealed that in any living system there are more than two electrons, the physicists would not speak to me. With all their computers they could not say what this third electron might do. The remarkable thing is that it knows exactly what to do. So that little electron knows something that all the wise men of Princeton don't, and this can only be something very simple.

Nature, basically, must be much simpler than she looks to us. She looks to us like a coded letter for which we have no code. To the degree to which our methods become less clumsy and more adequate and we find out nature's code, things must become not only clearer, but very much simpler, too."

- Albert Szent-Györgyi, M.D., Ph.D.
Teaching and the Expanding Knowledge