Here's a non-Kuhn-ized picture of modern physics theory, which perhaps clarifies why BurntS's approach sounds so wrong to me.
Imagine you've lost a whole ring-ful of keys in a campground at night. You don't know how many keys were on the ring, or where you might have dropped them, or even what they look like.
The mainstream physics approach is sort of multi-pronged.
You can only look for your keys if there's light, so you start looking near the known campfires. You go to a campfire and start scouring the ground around it. You're looking for obvious key-shaped bits of metal, but you'll also pick up (at least cursorily) anything unfamiliar---"is this a key or a twig? I can't tell yet"---and examine it until you can figure out whether it's a key of some sort.
The other thing you do is to try to expand the campfires. We know, right from the beginning, that there are dark areas we're not exploring yet. We also know that there's no point exploring them without more light. So while part of your research is scouring the fire-lit campsites for keys (actual laws of physics), part of it is looking for new firewood and fire-rings (new theoretical tools).
Experimentalists can help. Experiments can launch flaming arrows into the dark. If you're lucky, your arrow lands in a woodpile and starts a new fire, giving theorists a new place to search. Experiments can also retrieve facts about the keyring and the locks---"one of the missing keys is a brass, double-sided Yale; none of the keys are painted pink"---giving more focus to the searchers. If you find something you think is a key, an experimentalist can sometimes stick it in a lock and see if it opens.
So, some common "trouble-with-physics" complaints, mapped to my analogy.
- There's the big, original QM campfire and the big, original GR campfire. There used to be a dimly-lit area halfway between them, which Einstein spent his last decades searching. Both of the fires have gotten bigger since then, so this particular area is now well-lit and clearly devoid of lost keys.
- String theory. String theorists lit a big new campfire, which turns out to illuminate a burned-out key factory. There are keys and key-like objects everywhere. But we don't know what part of the factory we're sifting through. Is it a scrap pile, made up of non-keys? A discard pile, containing billions of real keys whose locks don't exist any more? A mixture of the two, with our real lost key on top somewhere? We don't know. The search is slow and frequently unproductive, though we're getting better at it---Maldacena, for example, discovered that each brass key is a copy of a steel key. There's also a strong smell of pine resin, leading people to suspect that there are fresh firewood-stacks in this area.
- Lee Smolin is annoyed that so many people are searching the key factory. He's got a small campfire of his own and wants more people to search the ground there. Peter Woit isn't actually searching for keys; he's sitting at Smolin's fire roasting marshmallows, and wants some company.
- Crackpots are wandering around the oldest campfires picking up bottlecaps and detritus. "This is a key!", says the crackpot, holding up a discarded tissue. "No it's not," say the searchers, "put it down." Another crackpot wanders over and picks up the same tissue. "This is a contact lens!" he says. "First, no it's not; second, we're looking for keys; third, that is also not a key." says the physicist. "That's what they told Galileo," says the crackpot.
- The more speculative sort of physicists---think Max Tegmark, Freeman Dyson, Frank Wilczek---like to look at the map of light and dark regions and speculate about the dark areas. "Most of the lit ground is sandy," they might say, "but mightn't there by an asphalt road running through it? Might there be a camp office with a vending machine? If so it's probably along the road. Sometimes people lose keys while rooting for quarters in their pockets."
- The LHC is a whole battalion of archers with flaming arrows, standing on the shore of a lake at the edge of the campground. They're shooting arrows as far as they can hoping to light a fire on the far shore---or any sort of dock, isthmus, islet, peninsula, or even a buoy near such a shore. But so far all these arrows have landed in the water. The shore may be just out of reach, or it might be a thousand miles away. There's no way to tell but to keep shooting harder and harder.
- BurntS is standing near the main, central bonfire. It's an area which has been searched heavily; indeed it's an area where all key-searchers train before heading to outlying campfires. "There really might be a key here," he says, pointing at the 2'x2' patch of sand underfoot. "I have drawn a map of the area around this bonfire, and a rational left-right sweep pattern that lets us search the whole area, and my sweep includes this patch right here." The searchers check his map. "We've covered that whole area many times over, including an excavation to a depth of three feet," they say. "But you didn't do it in a sweep pattern," says BurntS. "It's the same ground no matter how you cover it," say the searchers. "It'd be a shame if there's a key RIGHT HERE and we missed it because you didn't search my way," says BurntS. "Hey look! While you were staring at the ground, Nima Arkani-Hamed seems to have set fire to Feynman's entire site," say the searchers, scurrying off.
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