Agree but very much with your caveat. If you study the mathematics of some sort of abstract structure you are doing research in pure maths. That is a worthy and

Agree but very much with your caveat. If you study the mathematics of some sort of abstract structure you are doing research in pure maths. That is a worthy and completely legitimate pursuit and a ton of stuff started life as pure abstract mathematical research and ended up having real-world benefits way down the line that noone could have forseen.[1] If on the other hand you say that abstract structure is a fundamental building block of the universe and, say, unifies the standard model with gravity etc but actually your theory isn't explaining anything observable I would say that isn't theoretical physics[2] but is just "making shit up". So far string theory has failed to produce any sort of verifiable prediction[3], so I just don't see how it's physics (you could say "yet" perhaps). I enjoyed the video "String Theory Lied to Us and Now Science Communication is Hard"[4] by Angela Collier, who is a computational astrophysicist[5], because it gives a sense for how these things impact other physicists and the popular perception of science. [1] And Ed Witten for example is without doubt a very impressive mathematician - he won the Fields medal. [2] Which is the science of matter, energy, space, time etc all the stuff which makes up the natural world. [3] In particular, the one that has been tried is supersymmetry and the LHC, as I understand it as a non-physicist, brought about an experimental result that called supersymmetric extensions of the standard model into serious doubt https://arxiv.org/abs/1112.3068 https://arxiv.org/abs/1112.3068 [4] https://youtu.be/kya_LXa_y1E?si=FTC0sbs2ubxGyydZ https://youtu.be/kya_LXa_y1E?si=FTC0sbs2ubxGyydZ [5] https://jila.colorado.edu/sites/default/files/group-files/2021-09/cv_collier.pdf https://jila.colorado.edu/sites/default/files/group-files/20...