It sort of happened this way. After the great successes of the forties, fifties, and sixties, genuine measurable progress in particle physics came to a grinding halt. New, precise, quantitative theories were proposed by the hundreds, but all of them led to predictions that disagreed with experiment.

So physicists abandoned the "old fashioned" approach of trying to make theories that agreed with experiment and came out with new theories that made no predictions whatsoever and thus could not be tested at all. That way, the menace of disagreement with experiment could not rear its ugly head. Today we have "string theory" in all of its untestable ramifications, which has shown itself to be interesting mathematics, but has never demonstrated any real connection to physics whatsoever.

Meanwhile, the other areas of physics, such as solid state, plasma, etc, etc, are moving ahead with progressively better theories that agree ever more closely with experiment. This I call "progress"; I don't know what to call the other.

David F Mayer