[lazamar]

Lol. Loved it.

This was a lovely passage from Dyson’s Web of Stories interview, and it struck a chord with me, like it clearly did with the authors too.

It happened when Dyson took the preliminary results of his work on the Pseudoscalar theory of Pions to Fermi and Fermi very quickly dismissed the whole thing. It was a shock to Dyson but freed him from wasting more time on it.

Fermi: When one does a theoretical calculation, either you have a clear physical module in mind or a rigorous mathematical basis. You have neither. How many free parameters did you use for your fitting?

Dyson: 4

Fermi: You know, Johnny Von Neumann always used to say ‘with four parameters I can fit an elephant; and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk’.