Nature Uses As Little As Possible

Johannes Kepler wrote this in Astronomia Nova (1609), the work in which he announced his first two laws of planetary motion — that planets travel in ellipses with the Sun at one focus, and that a line from the Sun to a planet sweeps equal areas in equal times. The principle of economy in nature (later associated with Isaac Newton and others) reflected Kepler's conviction that God had designed the cosmos with elegant efficiency.