Most physicists are experimentalists, who work on testable predictions. And most theorists work on easily testable systems, like solid state physics or nuclear physics. And even cosmologists and astrophysicists in are very aware of the problems of ascribing astrophysical phenomena to new physics, it just took 70 years after Zwicky's invention of dark matter before anybody took it seriously as a sign of new physics.
By contrast, the small bit work done on theories that have purely theoretical appeal is getting all the press, and in a way that needs to improve a lot before one could call it grossly misleading. Take for example the sentence,
“The imprimatur of science should be awarded only to a theory that is
testable,” Ellis and Silk wrote, thereby disqualifying most of the
leading theories of the past 40 years.
Well, what is a leading theory supposed to be, 40 years ago the standard model was just that, a model that needed confirmation. The W and Z bosons were only discovered in 1983, the Top quark in 1994 and the Higgs two years ago. General relativity only had strong support in the high field regime with the discovery of the Hull-Taylor pulsar a year earlier. And as I said, most physicists did not work on fundamental physics in the last 40 years, but instead on stuff like the quantum Hall effect ( discovered by von Klitzing in the early 80ies) or the Giant Magneto-Resonance ( discovered in the late 80ies), both solid state effects with technological applications and Nobels in the last thirty years.
By contrast, the small bit work done on theories that have purely theoretical appeal is getting all the press, and in a way that needs to improve a lot before one could call it grossly misleading. Take for example the sentence,
Well, what is a leading theory supposed to be, 40 years ago the standard model was just that, a model that needed confirmation. The W and Z bosons were only discovered in 1983, the Top quark in 1994 and the Higgs two years ago. General relativity only had strong support in the high field regime with the discovery of the Hull-Taylor pulsar a year earlier. And as I said, most physicists did not work on fundamental physics in the last 40 years, but instead on stuff like the quantum Hall effect ( discovered by von Klitzing in the early 80ies) or the Giant Magneto-Resonance ( discovered in the late 80ies), both solid state effects with technological applications and Nobels in the last thirty years.