Somewhere in this comment section someone quoted the following line by Terrence Tao: >It seems bizarre to me that there would be an entire self-contained theor

Somewhere in this comment section someone quoted the following line by Terrence Tao: >It seems bizarre to me that there would be an entire self-contained theory whose only external application is to prove the abc conjecture after 300+ pages of set up, with no smaller fragment of this setup having any non-trivial external consequence whatsoever. so it's not so much that the main result is called into question but there are some useful and workable bits left over. Rather the main result is called into question because there are no other useful and workable bits.