To continue the progress of science, we have to again confront deep questions about space and time, quantum theory, and cosmology.

Has physics reached an impasse, and what can we do about it?
One source of the crisis is that many … theories have many freely adjustable parameters. As a result, some theories make no predictions at all.…

The most popular theories, such as supersymmetry, have many more free parameters – the simplest supersymmetric extension of the Standard Model has 105 additional parameters. This means that the theory is unlikely to be tested in upcoming experiments.

One reason string theory is popular is that there is some evidence that it points to a quantum theory of gravity.

A growing number of theoretical physicists … see the present situation as a crisis that requires us to re-examine the assumptions behind our so-far unsuccessful theories.

We have already had the example of the big-bang singularity in the remote past, which seems not to be avoidable. The “disaster” to physics occurred right at the beginning.