Saw a great talk by @skdh here at @FollowStevens on the perils of searching for "beauty" in physics — big take away was that "beauty" as a criteria for a scientific theory has a poor historical and philosophical track-record. Sometimes nature is beautiful, sometime it ain't.
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Another thought. How can we be definitive about beauty? Doesn't taste play a role? Might specimens of un-beautiful nature be found beautiful by others at other times and places? We need to be careful about buying too much into the notion that beauty is a subjective universal.
Hossenfelder identifies several meanings that physicists attribute to the term "beauty" (simplicity, naturalness, and elegance), but also agrees that it is often in the eye of the beholder, even in the mathematical-technical sense she means.
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But she would also say, I think, that even if everyone did agree it was beautiful, that is still not a valid criteria for theory adoption by itself. (So in a sense it doesn't matter whether it is universal, if it's universally a blind alley.)
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I wonder how much beauty as a criterion - often a shorthand for elegance in theoretical sciences - tracks onto the assumption that nature should be reducible to rational concepts? Despite prima facie rejecting it, do scientists residually think there must be reasons for things?
End of conversation
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