I may be biased by the selection of physicist I watched lectures of, but they would probably tend to disagree with the statement that physics got lost in mathem

I may be biased by the selection of physicist I watched lectures of, but they would probably tend to disagree with the statement that physics got lost in mathematics. Especially Nima Arkani-Hamed convincingly argues that we are fundamentally looking at the universe from the wrong perspective. Relativity and quantum theory are build around a few very fundamental principles like locality and unitarity and somewhat surprisingly those principles single out a very small set of possible theories that are compatible with those principles. But on the other hand those principles seem to obscure a more fundamental and simpler truth behind them. For example calculating scattering amplitudes may require hundreds or thousands of terms from different Feynman diagrams with more and more virtual particles but in the end they all cancel out. Surprisingly again there are ways to arrive at the same results - BCFW recursion relations and the amplituhedron - but with comparatively extremely simple calculations. But unlike Feynman diagrams, which suggest a picture of particles interacting locally in space, those calculations provide no picture that can be easily matched against recognizable things. The results are the same but there is nothing that looks like locally interacting particles in there. This then suggests that things we currently considered fundamental, for instance locality, are not fundamental, that they emerge from something more fundamental. And this is where mathematics might be really useful, you try to reformulate existing theories in new ways and maybe you find a representation that is much simpler than what we have and maybe that is what the universe is really like as compared to what it looks like to us. And maybe that will also suggest new experiments to be done and which do not require energies far beyond our current reach.