In this sweeping book, applied mathematician and popular author David Orrell questions the promises and pitfalls of associating beauty with truth, showing how ideas of mathematical elegance have inspired--and have sometimes misled--scientists attempting to understand nature.

Orrell shows how the ancient Greeks constructed a concept of the world based on musical harmony; later thinkers replaced this model with a program, based on Newton's "rational mechanics," to reduce the universe to a few simple equations. He then turns to current physical theories, such as supersymmetric string...