https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/...ists-are-misled-by-outdated-notions-of-beauty
https://www.forbes.com/sites/starts...r-best-living-minds-on-nonsense/#16f0667d7566This has been going on for about 40 years. In these 40 years, aesthetic arguments have flourished into research programmes—such as supersymmetry, the multiverse and grand unification—that now occupy thousands of scientists. In these 40 years, society spent billions of dollars on experiments that found no evidence to support the beautiful ideas. And in these 40 years, there has not been a major breakthrough in the foundations of physics.
My colleagues argue that criteria of beauty are experience-based. The most fundamental theories we currently have—the standard model of particle physics and Albert Einstein’s general relativity—are beautiful in specific ways. I agree it was worth a try to assume that more fundamental theories are beautiful in similar ways. But, well, we tried, and it didn’t work. Nevertheless, physicists continue to select theories based on the same three criteria of beauty: simplicity, naturalness, and elegance.