The Beautiful Explanation

I'm tired of reading Scientific American, and pretty much any other science journal. Why? Besides the seemingly endless array of logic errors? Well, they seem to espouse something I heard about a while ago that still bugs me: If there are two or more theories, the one that is probably correct is the most beautiful one. It gets mentioned in almost every String Theory article and book - String Theory is to Beautiful to be wrong.

Ever hear of Kepler? He had a beautiful model of our solar system. He reasoned that the known planets orbit the sun base on the five perfect Platonic solids: cube, tetrahedron, octahedron, icosahedron and dodecahedron. Beautiful theory - he ever created some very nice models. The main problem with it was that it was wrong. He eventually figured it out and we now have a better theory of planetary orbits.

There are other examples, but all illustrate the same point: Why do we believe that the Universe is simple and/or beautiful? The presumption is that we are smart enough to create an internal model of the Universe, but where is the proof? We believe that the rules of the Universe will seem beautiful to us, why? We are such a very small part of the whole, with so much of it beyond our grasp... Maybe it is because of this that we try to simplify the Universe first, we say it is banana shaped, which gives us a grasp on it. If we evolve enough, maybe we can move up to the next shape, eventually reaching something that we currently wouldn't believe to be beautiful, but those future "humans" would. Or would they?

The Edward