String theory is the physics analogy to Climate Change.
No physicist is permitted to mock string theory! It must be accepted without question, even though there is zero experimental evidence for it. I don’t know if it’s true now, but for a time anyway only string theory physicists were offered tenure at major universities.
I taught freshman college physics for awhile. One of my colleagues nicknamed me “the experimentalist”. That was not meant as a compliment.
Big Science has always been the enemy of real scientific progress.
The institutions focus on defending their turf and their reputations—at all costs.
By coinky-dinky, Luis Alvarez was an experimentalist. His unshared physics Nobel was in 1974 I think. The last unshared physics Nobel was in 1992, and most of those unshared physics Nobels in the preceding 20 years or so were awarded somewhat as lifetime achievement awards before the groundbreaking physicists died off. Among all the awards, there is just one — John Bardeen — who has won it twice (for the transistor, and for superconductivity work), each time shared with two others.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luis_Walter_Alvarez
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bardeen
“even though there is zero experimental evidence”
Not just zero actual experimental evidence. You can’t even do a proper thought experiment with string theory, since humans aren’t mentally capable of imagining anything outside our 3 (or 3 1/2) dimensional box. It’s like a blind cave fish trying to come up with a theory of optics.