There are many conjectures and many lines of research, and many of them are productive.
js post 176: I read quite a bit about the subject [string theory]in pop science media and have never seen it treated as anything but controversial. Not just as to whether it is “true,” but as to whether it qualifies as science.
There have been at least two recent FR threads on string theory, and both support what I’m saying about this.
OK, so now you have taken both abiogenesis and cosmology out of the realm of science because they apparently, according to you, are not theories but conjecture.
The question still remains about the origin of these concepts in the first place.
Were they not proposed by scientists? If not, then what field of human endeavor proposed these concepts first?
Are scientists not looking for evidence to support them? Is scientific research not being done in these fields?
If they are not science, then what classification would they fall under?
Is Hawkings not a scientist?
Conjectures are at the very heart of science, but to be theories or hypotheses they must lead to research. There is currently no program of research that could confirm or disconfirm string theory. There are merely mathematical models that are self-consistent or not.
Abiogenesis is an active and productive realm of research, but there is no hypothesis that puts the pieces together. Such was the world of astronomy before Newton and Einstein. A clever person might note that heliocentrism was pretty well established as the best description of the planetary system long before there was a clean mathematical basis. We're talking centuries here.
Is Hawking a scientist? LOL. Experimental physicists might say no. There's always been a feud between experimental and theoretical physicists. It's one of those things that can't happen in science because all scientists bow to a central authority.