Comment Only Game In Town (Score 1) 24
String Theory has contributed some useful mathematics but its position as the Only Game In Town (they call it that) appears to have been a psyop to keep Academia out of the work being done at private contractors.
Retired people from e.g. Skunkworks have described corrections and extensions of Maxwell's Equations and the Dirac Equation as the path that has yielded experimental success.
Those guys didn't "shut up and calculate". Their work is under NDA, WUSAP, ITAR, and Invention Secrecy Act restrictions.
Some parallel work, e.g. Exodus Technologies, has started to bear fruit in the public domain, so the psyop is being wound down now. Additionally China has surpassed the US in implementation so they want All Hands On Deck.
What was strategic advantage has become a strategic liability. One can understand this mindset by not caring about the hundreds of millions of lives that could have been saved by resultant technologies. When only State Supremacy (and COG) are factored in the normal human behavior goes out the window.
The impossible need to power AI for a communist surveillance police state may also be playing a factor; hard to know prospectively but somebody has the power source being demonstrated on the slow drip of DoD "UFO" videos.
Most people won't put Space Aliens on the top of the list of culprits when ATS projects by humans will suffice.
The biggest hurdle will be getting Deans and Department Chairs to discard their life's work as meaningless. What a "Good Scientist" should do and what most people will do are not the same. Hence the "funeral to funeral" adage.