Sabine Hossenfelder is worried about the misuse of beauty in physics. The idea of beauty led many researchers to the wrong theory. She wrote a book about the issue. So I took her seriously and had some fun the last few days searching on the internet for "standard model" and "ugly". I was astonished. There are many hits, starting with Stephen Hawking. It is also called "ugliest", "ugly as hell", "unnatural", "unsatisfactory" and more.
If you claim that the standard model is ugly, you direct your research efforts elsewhere. And you direct young researchers elsewhere. But are you right in doing so? Sabine is skeptical, and so am I.
Is the standard model ugly or beautiful? It depends on the way you describe it. Many call the standard model ugly because it is ad hoc and has around 24 parameters that are chosen arbitrarily. But Christoph Schiller would call the standard model beautiful, because all the parameters might follow from wiggling spaghetti and thus are not arbitrary at all. Who is right?
If Sabine is right, we must hope that Christoph follows her advice and calculates better approximations for the 24 parameters. Christoph, listen to Sabine!
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