I’d use another, less charitable, word. Finding the laws of physics isn’t any different than finding a winning play in Go, except the search space is vastly larger. If we aren’t going to pay for things like the Superconducting Supercollider, we aren’t going to pay for a brute-force search to find the laws of physics. We have to use heuristics to guide the search. “Beauty” has worked in the past (Gell-Mann has a TED talk on this) so there’s no reason to abandon it - until it doesn’t work. Then we’ll try something else. In addition it took, what, 300 years to prove Fermat’s Last Theorem? Good grief. For hard problems, 40 years is nothing.