This seems to discount the explosion of work in the foundations of theoretical physics. Most notably the many variations of String Theory. Just because the work has not yet produced experiments that can validate them do not mean they are not progress. It's some of the most exciting foundational work that's come for decades.
Hossenfelder is well aware of string theory, as she says right in the article:
"All these wrong predictions should have taught physicists that just because they can write down equations for something does not mean this math is a scientifically promising hypothesis. String theory, supersymmetry, multiverses. There’s math for it, alright. Pretty math, even. But that doesn’t mean this math describes reality."
> Just because the work has not yet produced experiments that can validate them do not mean they are not progress.
But it's not just that string theory hasn't yet produced experiments that can validate it. It's that (a) direct experiments to validate it are something like twenty orders of magnitude away in terms of energy scale, so not doable now or for the foreseeable future, and (b) every prediction it's made so far that can be tested at energy scales we can probe (such as the prediction that supersymmetry would show up at the LHC) has been wrong.
(And some of those theories have some large scale cosmological implications too, so better telescopes can rule out more.)
But ... there seems to be a lack of (serious) theories that have easily testable predictions. And this is not surprising, because we also lack easily reproducable but yet unexplained data. (For example the high-energy gamma ray busts are very interesting but we have no idea where do they come from really.)
Yes. The problem is that ruling out is all that's happening. Not one has had an implication about lower energy ranges that has turned out to be right.
At some point it's no wonder we need bigger microscopes to see deeper into reality.
Sure, were someone just come up with an even better theory that can be tested easily, that would be great too, but since we have no recipe for that, but we have quite a few for building bigger experiments, that's what most of the particle physicists advocate.
The argument I've seen expressed about this, is that these advances should more properly be considered advances in mathematics not physics. Or to put it another way "the math works, but we have no idea if it applies to the real world or not."
It's a question for the episemologists, I suppose, whether or not we should consider an advance "real new knowledge" if there's no experimental validation.
The problem isn’t that no ones has managed to experimentally validate the theory. The problem is that string theory has failed to even make predictions that even in theory could be experimentally tested.
Edit: since I’m getting downvoted, is there anything factually wrong with what I have written?