>The decades old battle in theoretical physics over bragging rights between the "string" and "loop" camps would seem to be an even more significant example with

>The decades old battle in theoretical physics over bragging rights between the "string" and "loop" camps would seem to be an even more significant example within the hard sciences of a collaborative intra-promotion rivalry given the apparent failure of both groups to produce a quantum theory of gravity. In string theory we quantize gravity by attaching voodoo parameters to particles, and manipulating those parameters so that they forbid the gravitational ultraviolet catastrophe. In LQG or NQFT we attach voodoo parameters to spacetime, forbidding tiny singularities. We can also attach voodoo parameters to gravity itself and get the theory of asymptotically safe gravity. I think that would be four theories. Anyone who finds better-justified voodoo parameters should be welcomed into the ring, but that is very difficult. Personally I find the voodoo parameters in NQFT to be the least weird, but Connes (a leading proponent) earned some raspberries for his oh-wait-I-didn't-mean-that revision of his prediction of the Higgs mass ( https://arxiv.org/pdf/1208.1030.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1208.1030.pdf ).