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RE: The Most Beautiful Experiment In Biology
Another great explanation of a historically significant experiment. The way I learned it, the experiment is "beautiful" because it didn't favor any of the three hypothetical mechanisms, yet it managed to definitively prove the semi-conservative replication model to be true all by itself. The idea is that no matter what model turned out to be correct, this single experiment would have shown it to be valid. To any aspiring graduate student, it is a lesson on why you should carefully plan experiments to maximize the chance of a useful result rather than fishing for data.
Still, the experiment is beautiful for a number of reasons so multiple interpretations are valid.
Yes, I was partly defining beauty as it's used generally in all the sciences, like in mathematics and physics, instead of why this specific experiment was called beautiful, so you're more correct when it comes to the specifics: the experiment was perfectly designed to be at once decisive and impartial (not to mention replicable, much like its subject matter!)