Empirical. I work in fluid dynamics. While I think purely formal fields like math have their advantages (as you point out), I would not be surprised if that lit

Empirical. I work in fluid dynamics. While I think purely formal fields like math have their advantages (as you point out), I would not be surprised if that literature is less reliable than most people believe. I know from my own experience that even highly cited papers with theoretical models can have surprisingly obvious major problems. Sometimes no empirical data is needed to know that something isn't right. The exact same reasons one might be suspicious of a pure math result can apply here.