And everything in our experience tells us that nature abhors ugly. The belief in elegance is more than a matter of experience. It is an article of faith. We believe the universe is beautiful, and in science there is nothing more beautiful than a large truth expressed with simplicity and brevity. And not just in science.
Brevity is the first principle of rhetoric too, and perhaps the most violated.
Or take the Truman Doctrine, the 50th anniversary of which we celebrate this year. It set the course of American foreign policy for a half-century. It took 18 minutes to deliver. Brevity is so highly prized that one good aphorism can earn its coiner immortality. Yet the high priests of the press denounce the sound bite, staple of the 30-second political ad, as a degradation of political discourse.