What is really crippling the progress of string theory?

The fact that it's not a theory, and all the work on it has already given up on following the scientific method in order to arrive at a real theory. The entire matter is really a coup inside the theoretical physics industry, where a bunch of worthless mathematicians took the lead, and all they do is sit around totally absorbed in their math, oblivious of the previous need for, oh gee I dunno, RUNNING EXPERIMENTS to test hypotheses in order to ultimately support a real theory.

Personally I suspect that the entire physics industry just matured and found itself looking for the easy way out. Physicists were unable to find a link between relativity and quantum mechanics, despite decades of trying. So they were looking like fools. String 'theory' gave them the opportunity to work pretty much forever on physics without looking like fools to the common man for their inability to actually come up with a workable theory. Job security, forever. The new paradigm in physics is that you can sit around and play math games and never actually spark any experiments or verification process of any sort... and you still get paid your salary and your grants keep getting funded. *But there are no results.*

Hell, that's the dream of K-12 unionized educators in public systems, and they achieved that dream a long time ago. They get paid for no results, or results that are so piss poor that rational socio-economics would have fired all those people and blacklisted them from the industry due to their massive incompetence.

Anyway, to day, string 'theory' has produced no predictions, and in fact is unable to produce them, be design. It's not a theory; it's a way for about 1500 physicists worldwide to collect paychecks even though they don't actually produce. We've about the same number of string 'theorists' today as we did in all of physics when Einstein was working in the Swiss patent office. The industry became bloated.

>>2

(For the duration of this discussion I will drop my RedCream persona.)

The answer to your posting is: Not exactly.

Dark Energy is a just a thing that was named since there is an effect in the universe that must be accounted for. Nobody has any real idea what it might be, but the effect still exists: The speed of the universe's expansion seems to be increasing, as indicated by ancient supernova data.

Dark Matter is much more firmly based in physicality. Galaxies rotate, move and bend light in ways that suggest they have far more matter in them than is 'visibly' indicated. Hence, that matter is considered 'dark' with respect to all previous means of detection. What remains now is for physicists to contrive means of detection of this matter, and there've been tiny advances on that front. The movement and effects of galaxies just aren't in question; where the matter is, and what the matter is, ARE in question.

To understand about Dark Matter, read up a few books on the topic. We can generally divide the search into three categories: Cold gas, massive compact halo objects, and weakly-interacting particles.