If you have time, Lee Smolin's book The Trouble with Physics is a captivating read. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trouble_with_Physics https://en.wikipedia

If you have time, Lee Smolin's book The Trouble with Physics is a captivating read. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trouble_with_Physics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trouble_with_Physics Smolin makes a sosiological-historical argument, that from the 20s to 70s, the development in theoretical particle physics was done by trusting the "mathematical intuition", if the math was beautiful and predicted the existence of some particles, a bit later usually the experimental physicists found those particles. And the rewards and Nobel prizes went to those who did the math the fastest. So the whole theoretical physics adopted this style of work, when someone proposes something new that looks interesting, everyone tries to do the math as quickly as possible, to be the first to get the results. But then from the 70s to 00s, this flocking attitude was applied to string theory, and people just developed string math furiously, and it was left unnoticed that the theory was totally unrelated to any experiments. So, Smolin suggests, for 30 years the best of theoretical physics went into a direction that may be totally separated from experiments. If this turns out to be true, theoretical physics pretty much lost 30 years.