This seems like a fully general (and somewhat unconvincing) argument against doing theoretical physics. The key paragraphs are: "What’s going to happen with th

This seems like a fully general (and somewhat unconvincing) argument against doing theoretical physics. The key paragraphs are: "What’s going to happen with this new solution? Most likely, someone’s going to find a problem with it, and everyone will continue working on their own solution. Indeed, there’s a good chance that by the time this video appears this has already happened. For me, the real paradox is why they keep doing it. I guess they do it because they have been told so often this is a big problem that they believe if they solve it they’ll be considered geniuses. But of course their colleagues will never agree that they solved the problem to begin with. So by all chances, half a year from now you’ll see another headline claiming that the problem has been solved. And that’s why I stopped working on the black hole information loss paradox. Not because it’s unsolvable. But because you can’t solve this problem with mathematics alone, and experiments are not possible, not now and probably not in the next 10000 years." First, let's grant that no experimental evidence will be forthcoming in thousands of years. (It's conceivable to me that some astronomers will get lucky and provide some indirect evidence of some sort, but ignore this for now.) Why do we believe that this problem can't be solved, or at least profitably investigated, with mathematics (and physical intuition, and the rest of the experimental evidence we have about black holes – it's definitely not "mathematics alone")? At least in principle, one can imagine that there is a finite set of possible solutions (corresponding to dropping various assumptions, as she mentions earlier in the article), and all but one of those can be ruled out a priori via mathematical inconsistencies, a contradiction with physical evidence from non-black hole phenomena, or other undesirable properties. Maybe there are special features of the black hole information problem that make this impossible. But this overall mode of mathematical investigation is how theoretical physics works and has always worked. Einstein discovered general relativity by tweaking assumptions and deducing the theory was likely to be true because it resolved various issues, but we had no direct test [edit: of gravitational waves] for about 100 years. It would have been unfortunate if he concluded the problem was pointless to work on because no experimental evidence would manifest within his lifetime. (Example problem fixed by Einstein: https://aether.lbl.gov/www/classes/p10/gr/PrecessionperihelionMercury.htm https://aether.lbl.gov/www/classes/p10/gr/Precessionperiheli...)