These are exciting times for the field of physics. In 2012, researchers announced the discovery of the Higgs boson, a discovery four decades in the making, costing billions of dollars (and euros, pounds, yen and yuan) and involving some of the best minds on the planet. And in December 2015, researchers at the Large Hadron Collider in Europe reported that two separate experiments have reported possible traces of a new particle, one that might lie outside the Standard Model, although much more data and scrutiny will be required before anything definite can be said.
Yet behind the scenes a far-reaching battle has been brewing. The battle pits leading figures of string theory and the multiverse on one hand, against skeptics who argue that physics is parting ways with principles of empirical testability and falsifiability that have been the hallmarks of scientific research for at least a century.
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