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| A rendition of “barmaid physics” type explanations, wherein the guy tries to explain, at left, Ben Biddle’s 2013 “Innovation is like a Chemical Reaction” cocktail napkin idea, and at right, Roger Penrose’s 2004 conjecture of the second law, under the stipulation of a positive cosmological constant, as: “Entropy per baryon tends so increase relentlessly and stupendously with time” to a beautiful, albeit simple minded (see: Beckhap's law) female bar tender. [4] |
“If you can’t make a physical model of it, you don’t understand it well enough.”Wilson— James Maxwell (or William Thomson) (c.1870), stated somewhere, in thereabout this form [?]
“The laws of physics should be simple enough that a barmaid can grasp them.”— Charles Wilson (c.1911) (Ѻ)
Rutherford
“It should be possible to explain the laws of physics to a barmaid.”— Ernest Rutherford (c.1915) [5]
“If a piece of physics cannot be explained to a barmaid, then it is not a good piece of physics.”— Ernest Rutherford (c.1915) (Ѻ)
“A good scientific theory should be explicable to a barmaid.”— Ernest Rutherford (c.1915) (Ѻ)
“No physical theory is worth much if it cannot be explained to a barmaid.”— Ernest Rutherford (c.1915) (Ѻ)
“A scientist who can’t explain his theories to a barmaid doesn’t really understand them.”— Ernest Rutherford (c.1915) (Ѻ)
“An alleged scientific discovery has no merit unless it can be explained to a barmaid.”— Ernest Rutherford (c.1915) (Ѻ)
“All physical theories, their mathematical expressions apart, ought to lend themselves to so simple a description that even a child could understand them.”— Albert Einstein (c.1930), comment to Louis de Broglie [5]
“If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.”— Albert Einstein (1947), supposedly derived (Ѻ) from Rutherford “barmaid” comment [6]
“One major difference between the ‘games’ played by theoretical physicists and those played by pure mathematicians is that, aside from meeting the demands of internal consistency and mathematical rigor, a physical model must also meet the inflexible boundary condition of agreeing with physical reality.”— James Cushing (date); compare Gibbs on mathematicians vs. physicists [7]
