You can argue that science "worked" in the case of string theory in so far as it (eventually) came to be seen as a lot of untestable mathematical games with zero experimental evidence to support it.

Of course, "follow the science" is more commonly interpreted as the scientific community consensus ~= the truth. So having a generation of physics that essentially ended up as "never mind" doesn't instill a lot of public faith that scientists know what they're talking about in general.