A major problem with modern quantum theory is that it provided a surfeit of naive intuition about what to expect from nature largely untutored by geometry/algebra. That is, what is naively elegant to a quantum field theorist is not to nature or a geometer:
When quantum field theorists talk about the ‘beauty’ of super-partners (e.g. gluinos, squarks) geometers and even nature herself seem to shrug. I quite honestly don’t disagree with the field theorists except for the naive aspect of their hope: they ignored other beauty standards.
This is at the heart of my disagreement with @skdh. I am doubly contrarian with respect to QFT. I believe that many of the things they tried say were abstractly reasonable but clearly misinstanciated. To make their mere calculations beautiful, they were creating a hideous world.
In short it was not beauty that lead physics astray. It was imbalance. Like a beautiful person going under the knife repeatedly to achieve perfection, in the end you see a monstrosity driven perversely and ironically by a sense of beauty because *total* beauty was neglected. End.
