Symmetry in M - Good Ideas / Bad Ideas

Intuitively speaking, a good idea applies to more than just one situation. Bad ideas don't apply to any situation or they apply to one situation but get applied in "analogous" situations where they don't really "fit". A good example of the latter is the idea of "God the Father" who acts like a very strange father indeed.

An example of a really good idea is Maxwell's equations that did the job of explained electromagnetic fields. But then it "dropped out" of the equations that the vibration between the fields would travel at the speed of light and that there were many other vibrations with different frequencies that also traveled at the speed of light. This is an example of a relatively simple idea that returns a lot more than what you put in and applies to a lot more situations than the one you applied it to in the first place.