To explain, I’m just a big old ignorant layman, but with other scientific fields I at least CONCEPTUALLY understand how they came to their findings.
Like if a Geologist tells me something about rocks I’m like: “Okay, idk how geology works, but I assume you did some kind of experiments involving rocks so you probably know what you’re talking about.”
Or if a neurologist tells me something about the human brain: “Okay, idk shit about neurology, but I assume you did some kind of brain scan or took some brain samples or did some kind of scientific experiment thingy to know this stuff about brains. I don’t know the exact details but I can at least abstractly understand the process by which you learned this thing you’re telling me now.”
Then I’ll see some news report about some finding a theoretical physicists made and it’ll be like: “The Universe is made of strings! And also the sun is a black hole! The universe is shaped like a doughnut!”
And my honky ass is just like: “How the fuck do you know that shit? What are you looking at? How did you figure that crap out?”
from what i remember during my bachelors degree in physics, theres two main things going on:
Proving more of the Standard Model. The standard model governs pretty much all particle physics. So far a lot of it is proven experimentally. But there are still things that are predicted, but not yet verified. This is stuff that the Hadron collider and CERN are doing
Reconciling General relativity and quantum mechanics. At large scales, GR is pretty much proven. At small scales, QM is pretty proven. But both theories are incompatible with the other. Dunno much about this personally. They’re looking for a Grand Unified Theory.
String theory is just bunk science, don’t need to really investigate it any further.
String theory is unfalsifiable. It can appear to be very good at prediction because it doesn’t have the burden of requiring experimental proof. Basically the particle physics equivalent of the “what if what you experience as red, I experience as blue”.