https://lilith.fisica.ufmg.br/~dsoares/fdyson.htm
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39750162
The first link contains the full anecdote of Freeman Dyson's meeting
with Enrico Fermi, where Fermi said the memorable words:
"I remember my friend Johnny von Neumann used to say, with four
parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle
his trunk."
Also said Fermi in the same meeting:
"There are two ways of doing calculations in theoretical physics:
One way, and this is the way I prefer, is to have A CLEAR PHYSICAL
PICTURE OF THE PROCESS that you are calculating.
The other way is to have a precise and self-consistent mathematical
formalism."
By the way, there is so much similarity between this Spring 1953 meeting between Freeman Dyson and Enrico Fermi, and that between Wilhelm Weber
and Frederich Gauss about a century earlier in Spring 1845. There too,
Weber met with his mentor Gauss to discuss his new theory of
electrodynamics (now known as Weber's electrodynamics), and Gauss
expressed a similar sentiment as Fermi:
Gauss: "... the actual keystone is lacking: namely, the derivation of
the additional forces (which enter into the reciprocal action of
electrical particles at rest, if they are in relative motion) from the
action which is not instantaneous, but on the contrary (in a way
comparable to light) propagates itself in time. ... However, [to arrive
at this] it would first be necessary to make A CONSTRUCTIBLE
REPRESENTATION of the way in which the propagation occurs."
(for full content, see: Letters between Weber and Gauss in 1845).
Also it is interesting, that in the current theory of electrodynamics,
this fundamental equation describing the force between two charged
particles in relative motion is so difficult to derive, it is only
covered in the most advanced post graduate courses on electrodynamics,
and is given without any derivation in Feynman Lectures Vol. II as Eqn.
21.1.
https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/II_21.html#footnote_source_1
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