> Sure, but that's sort of a triviality. It's true for any theory. It is not a triviality. OP and many other people insist that nothing is important unless the

> Sure, but that's sort of a triviality. It's true for any theory. It is not a triviality. OP and many other people insist that nothing is important unless there is empirical evidence. Was there any empirical evidence that the Higgs boson is real and all competing theories are wrong before physicists spent billions of dollars to find it? Yet it was one of the most convincing theories, even if most of the evidence was theoretical, intuitive and aesthetic rather than empirical. I think you, as a former theoretical physicist, can come up with a dozen theories that are uglier but could fit old data just as well. The most trivial way to do it is just to say that in those experiment we should’ve expected those results and so on without any generalization. But of course numerous more sophisticated wrong theories would be possible. There is no theory that is so bad that it can’t be “fixed” with a few epicycles. By the way, Ptolemaic vs Copernician model is another good example of two different theories with similar or exactly the same fit w.r.t. to old experiments and observations. > This, too, illustrates that experiments would be possible (and worthwhile) even without theory That just illustrates that you can build a theoretical model with lots of free parameters and low interpretability. > Note that I'm not at all trying to play down the role of theory. Right. And I was just responding to OP who completely downplayed it.