Abstract
Elegance is pursued and appreciated in virtually all aspects of our lives, from fashion to visual and performing arts, from literature to architecture. While most of us praise the elegance and beauty of science when we see it, elegance is typically treated as something that need not concern our research and thus does not belong inside the laboratory. In this article, we provide an alternative perspective, according to which elegance is more than an accessory ornament of scientific theories. We endorse and defend the view that elegance is an intrinsic feature of successful scientific practice and observation, a benchmark that demarcates between good experiments and bad ones. In support of our conclusions, we present and discuss three paradigms of scientific elegance: Jenner's discovery of vaccination, Bricker and Slatopolsky's trade-off hypothesis and Brenner's hypothesis regarding the role of residual nephrons in the decline of renal function.
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