> No one has argued that beauty holds precedent over truth Here's Paul Dirac, writing in 1963: "it is more important to have beauty in one’s equations than to

> No one has argued that beauty holds precedent over truth Here's Paul Dirac, writing in 1963: "it is more important to have beauty in one’s equations than to have them fit experiment. [...] It seems that if one is working from the point of view of getting beauty in one’s equations, and if one has really a sound insight, one is on a sure line of progress." Here's John Schwarz, one of the pioneers of string theory, explaining why he and a collaborator kept working on it in the early 1970s after quantum chromodynamics turned out to be a better way of dealing with the strong nuclear force and before it emerged as a promising approach to quantum gravity: "We felt strongly that string theory was too beautiful a mathematical structure to be completely irrelevant to nature." The idea that string theory is "so beautiful it must be right" is, I think, mostly a strawman -- you hear critics of string theory taking it down, rather than advocates of string theory talking it up -- but the idea that beauty is a reliable guide to truth in physics isn't so strawy.