It's not surprising that beauty plays a big role in science. An experiment that a music teacher gave us when I was kid was a sheet of paper with a bunch of shapes on a Conway's Game of Life like grid and he simply asked us to rate which are beautiful.<p>And most people converged on the shapes that weren't purely random, or extremely simple, but the ones that actually looked like the kind of interesting shapes that meaningful patterns in the actual GoL look like. Just on the edge of order and chaos, and his point was that this is where great works of music also live. Andrei Tupolev of the famous Soviet design bureau of the same name used to exclaim: "ugly, it won't fly!" when seeing plane schematics he didn't like.<p>Beauty is an intuition for objects, ideas, artifacts or what have you that inhabit exactly that space where something is both simple or fundamental but also complex at the same time and having an instinct for these things is a great asset in science or engineering.