How the belief in beauty has triggered a crisis in physics
&gt;“Why should the laws of nature care about what I find beautiful?”<p>I find this question to be missing the fundamental point of scientific endeavour. Nature obviously does not care about beauty, but scientists do because extracting meaning and order (laws) from observations and building models is the <i>very essence</i> of scientific insight.<p>The goal of science is not to replicate nature, it is to build a model of nature from which we can collect insights and make predictions, the model does not need to &#x27;conform to&#x27; nature. That&#x27;s not the point. If that were the case we could just dump the LHC data into a textbook. There is a great story writen by Borges called  <i>The Exactitude of Science</i> where he creates the analogy of a large, but useless map:<p><i>&quot;... In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.&quot;</i>