On Fitting Parameters
“When Dyson met Fermi, he quickly put aside the graphs he was being shown indicating agreement between theory and experiment.
His verdict, as Dyson remembered, was “There are two ways of doing calculations in theoretical physics. One way, and this is the way I prefer, is to have a clear physical picture of the process you are calculating. The other way is to have a precise and self-consistent mathematical formalism. You have neither.”
When a stunned Dyson tried to counter by emphasizing the agreement between experiment and the calculations, Fermi asked him how many free parameters he had used to obtain the fit. Smiling after being told “Four,” Fermi remarked, “I remember my old friend Johnny von Neumann used to say, with four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk.” There was little to add.”
-- Segre G., Hoerlin B. The Pope of Physics: Enrico Fermi and the Birth of the Atomic Age