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IANAP but my understanding is we've reached a point where it's very difficult to test anything in physics. Eg, we've picked all the low-hanging fruit and everything left is something that requires large expenditures to test (more powerful particle colliders, etc).

Is there some alternative direction available where testing and verification are easier and cheaper?

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>Is there some alternative direction available where testing and verification are easier and cheaper?

A plurality of physicists now work in condensed matter. See e.g.

https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/PT.3.4110

This is the right question, although I don't know if there is a happy answer. If we need ever more expensive experiments to learn anything, progress is going to become very slow.

Maybe that's why there is so much math; math is cheap. And there is always the hope of coming up with something testable.

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