I was never sure how beauty applied to math. Wouldn't simplicity be the most accurate goal?

My sense is there is a lot of fudging going on.

Epicycles were brilliant math, as a model of our geocentric view of the cosmos and given we are our point of view, quite applicable. It was when they tried to extract some explanatory cause from the model that things went awry.

There seems to be much of that going on currently, where the models are considered sacrosanct and the physics is expected to conform.

Consider current cosmology; If intergalactic space were to expand, why doesn't the speed of the light crossing it in crease proportionally, in order to remain CONSTANT?

Instead, two metrics are being derived from the same light. One based on the speed and one based on the spectrum. Given it is an expanding space theory and not a tired light theory, the speed is still being used as the denominator.

As for the notion of spacetime, as a physical basis for Relativity, it is based on the view of time as a flow from past to future, but that is an effect of our thought process functioning as a sequence of perceptions, in order to navigate, as mobile organisms.

The evident reality is that activity and the resulting change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns.

There is no dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.

Energy is conserved, because it manifests this presence, creating time, temperature, pressure, color and sound. As frequencies and amplitudes, rates and degrees.

Energy goes past to future, because the patterns generated come and go, future to past.

Energy drives the wave, the fluctuations rise and fall. No tiny strings necessary.

Consciousness goes past to future, while the perceptions, emotions and thoughts giving it form and structure go future to past.

The digestive system processes the energy, feeding the flame, the nervous system sorts the patterns and the circulation system is feedback in the middle.

Given galaxies are energy radiating out, while structure coalesces in, this relationship between energy and the waves, patterns generated would be a good place to look for an overall theory.

As dark matter is required to explain the full spectrum of gravitational effects, it might be worth considering whether this relationship is backward and it is the properties we associate with mass that are intermediate effects of this centripetal dynamic of structure, essentially resonance and synchronization of waves. That mass is an effect of gravity, rather than gravity a property of mass.

That the music is more real than the matter.

Now that would be beauty.