Cosmology and astro fundamentally can be tested. The models therein have implications on things like the Cosmic Microwave Background, so it fits "societal prog

Cosmology and astro fundamentally can be tested. The models therein have implications on things like the Cosmic Microwave Background, so it fits "societal progress" in the sense it pushes humanity's knowledge of the universe forward. I do think particle theory probably does push knowledge forward, the problem is it is quite a bit further from something that can be tested, it is more akin to mathematics these days where they're not really trying to describe reality because as she says, susy and friends could be morphed to fit anything. In fact, and this might be a stretch, but I feel like there is a motivation not to have predictions sometimes because then you could be proven wrong. Perhaps this is still "pushing knowledge in general forward" as opposed to knowledge that actually describes reality, similar to mathematics perhaps. Not really related to societal progress, but the difference between particle theory with mathematics is mathematicians are actually rigorous while particle physicists get by with the usual lack of rigor (relatively) of physics in general. The argument usually employed by theorists in other physics fields is that this lack of rigor is okay because physics is science and you could always do an experiment afterwards to validate theory. Particle physics less and less has that, so, where does it sit? I feel like may be a valid path forward is for particle physicists to embrace that they are no longer really doing science and are rather doing mathematics, and probably to even adopt some of the rigor of mathematics, then particle theory could really bloom into a really valuable field of study on the "pushing general knowledge forward" side of things.