In reply to Kaptain K.'s comment:
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HA!
Fleming damn near threw out the contaminated petri dish that had all the dead bacteria in it! Thus, penicillin was discovered. Serendipity runs rampant through all fields of science!
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One cannot use the fact that penicillin has discovered serendipitously in 1928 to conclude that developing m-theory models which have a 13 dimensional space that contain branes or strings or some other theoretical mathematical entity (there are 100^503 possible models) is science and is different than alchemy.
As I noted biology has continued to advance, theoretical physics as others have noted has not. There have been no Nobel prizes awarded for “m-theory”.
You did not answer my question. Is m-theory akin to alchemy?
I field where theories multiply without constraint is a field in crisis. The “theoretical” physics theories are closer to fantasy than science fiction.
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The discovery of high temperature super conductivity is an example of a physics discovery that was made using the Edison method of trail and error, based on a hutch, by Karl Müller and Johannes Bednorz.
From Wikipedia
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High-Tc superconductivity was discovered in 1986; until then it was thought that BCS theory ruled out superconductivity at temperatures above 30 K. The experimental discovery of the first high-Tc superconductor by Karl Müller and Johannes Bednorz was immediately recognized by the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1987.
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High-temperature superconductivity allows some materials to support superconductivity at temperatures above the boiling point of liquid nitrogen (77 K or −196 °C). Indeed, they offer the highest transition temperatures of all superconductors. The ability to use relatively inexpensive and easily handled liquid nitrogen as a coolant has increased the range of practical applications of superconductivity.
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Although cuprate compounds in the normal superconducting state share many characteristics with each other, there is as of 2008 no widely accepted theory to explain their properties. The search for a theoretical understanding of high-temperature superconductivity is widely regarded as one of the most important unsolved problems in physics, and it continues to be a topic of intense experimental a ...
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