a (revised) draft of R5RS

[Chris Hanson <cph@martigny.ai.mit.edu>]

   From: Kent Pitman <kmp@harlequin.com>
   Date: Wed, 19 Mar 97 14:34:55 EST

   Your analysis would lead one to believe that Newtonian physics was
   clean and elegant and Einsteinian physics just gunked things up by
   making things more complicated.

I agree with you regarding the _ideas_ here.  However, in terms of the
mathematics, Einsteinian physics was a complete mess.  Elegant, it was
not -- a mess of tensor subscripts that is horrifying to behold.

Today, this has been cleaned up, and there are abstract mathematical
models for relativity that are elegant.  They are still hard to
understand, because the machinery is very complex, but they reflect
the underlying ideas is a clear and concise way.

So in fact your example also reinforces my point, although I didn't at
first realize it.  The mathematics of relativity was driven by
Einstein's need to express his ideas.  At the time, the mathematical
language wasn't up to the job, so he made do with what was then
available.