Are the Laws of Nature Ugly?

Dr. Bee rants about beauty in physics:

4:02 In my book 10 years ago I argued that when we understand the laws of nature better, we will eventually come to find them beautiful. Not because the maths is so pretty but because it describes nature. And because it has happened in the past.

4:18 Astronomers originally thought that planets should move in circles around the sun. When it turned out that this didn't quite work, they added circles around circles, the infamous epicycles, just because circles are so pretty. Today we just use ellipses and no one thinks that’s ugly.

4:37 Quantum mechanics is another example. It faced a lot of resistance initially because it was supposedly ugly. Not just the early versions, but also later extensions to quantum field theory which required getting rid of infinites. Physicists today have just gotten used to it. No one calls it ugly anymore.

4:57 And Maxwell’s theory of electrodynamics too, didn’t live up to the beauty standards of the day, which were based on a mechanistic world view. It seemed odd that electric and magnetic fields would just exist on their own, rather than being a property of something else, some underlying substrate, an aether, little gears, something. Today we just accept fields as fundamental.

5:24 Einstein’s theory of special relativity interestingly enough was originally not rejected because it was ugly but largely for philosophical reasons.

These are some strange arguments. The infamous epicycles are the ones related to retrograde motion, not approximating ellipses.

I guess some people said renormalization theory is ugly, and I have heard some say the standard model is ugly. But compared to what?

Special relativity was very rapidly accepted around 1908-10. At the time, no one thought of it as Einstein's theory. It was hard to accept because it seemed so strange that motion would distort space and time. But what were the philosophical reasons? Maybe we will hear in another podcast.