Physics used to be "hard science" - if it wasn't testable, it wasn't meaningful. Physicists used to look down on other sciences for that reason. This article shows how much worse things have become. Nobody can figure out a way to test string theory. In cosmology, you can only observe, not experiment. As the article points out, the big questions are out of reach for scaling reasons.
Trying to fix the problem through weaker definitions of "testable" is desperation. All those smart people hate to face the fact that what they're doing may be total bullshit. This has major economic consequences for physicists - why should they be funded? Physics is funded because it produced the atomic bomb and semiconductors. Those came from the testable parts of physics. Untestable physics cannot produce engineering technology.
(The article says "no one has ever seen an atom". That's just wrong. There are lots of picture of atoms. Even pictures of atoms lined up to spell "IBM".[1])
Trying to fix the problem through weaker definitions of "testable" is desperation. All those smart people hate to face the fact that what they're doing may be total bullshit. This has major economic consequences for physicists - why should they be funded? Physics is funded because it produced the atomic bomb and semiconductors. Those came from the testable parts of physics. Untestable physics cannot produce engineering technology.
(The article says "no one has ever seen an atom". That's just wrong. There are lots of picture of atoms. Even pictures of atoms lined up to spell "IBM".[1])
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/1990/04/05/us/2-researchers-spell-ibm...