If you think of the pursuit of new physics as an optimisation problem then the bias toward "beauty" is a guard against overfitting. Additionally, part of being "beautiful" to a physicist means that it gives insight into the "why" of the problem which helps in the pursuit of the next bit of new physics.

Huh? I'm new to much of this but keep thinking the Lagrangian is incredibly elegant: a tool which boils the determination of a physical system's behavior down to minimizing a single definite integral. That takes my breath away.

You're talking about the idea of the Lagrangian, the parent was talking about the specific Lagrangian that describes the standard model of particle physics. If you write it all out it takes about a page.

It's a Frankentheory - a collection of reanimated theory body parts sewn together. I totally get why physicists want something more elegant.

The problems are social. Financialisation means a lot of smart PhDs get hoovered up by Wall St to do (effectively useless) work as quants. At the same time, pressure in academia - also created ultimately by financialisation - has made genuinely original creative work an extremely risky career move.

So PhD advisors are far more likely to say "Don't do that" when a hot prospect says "I want to explore this unusual thing which i found from way back which no one else is looking at."

And the idea that a patent clerk without a formal academic affiliation could publish papers that transform physics has become ridiculous.

Conversely mainstream ideas of questionable value - like string theory - which should only ever have remained a fringe interest have become absolutely central, because they're a relatively easy way for ambitious PhDs aiming for tenure to produce plausible physics-like content.

Science was working pretty well around the turn of the century. Now there's sand in the gears, and the entire machine is in danger of seizing up.

What do you mean by "financilisation?"

Not minimizing the Lagrangian, but finding the extrema.

It certainly has no obligation to appeal to our sensibilities...

Our sensibilities were created by selective pressures that are the direct result of the physical laws of this universe. I don’t think that’s a fluke. I think we are awed by mathematical beauty because it is just as fundamental and profound as it appears.

An objective* way to quantify the elegance and parsimony of a hypothesis is through algorithmic information theory, specifically Kolmogorov complexity.

* Certain conditions apply.