Crisis in Physics vs Computational Physics

The May14 issue of Scientific American asks the following questions:

• Does Physics Have a Problem?
• Crisis in Physics?

These questions naturally present themselves because modern theoretical physicists have driven themselves to search for the truth on scales which are either too small (string theory) or too big (cosmology) to be assessed experimentally. But theory without experiment may well be empty theory and that may be the meaning of the crisis. Of course, advocates of string theory like Lubos, forcefully denies that there is a crisis in physics. But there are other blog voices…and leading physicists show little hope..

But modern physicists have a new tool to use and that is computational physics, which offers an experimental laboratory without the scale limits of a physical laboratory. 

Computational physics needs computable models, but both quantum mechanics and general relativity are based on models which are not computable, and so there is a lot of work to be done. The question is if modern theoretical physicists have the right training to do this work.