Why so impatient?

The Earth goes around the Sun, not the other way around. Copernicus realized this for the first time in the early 16th century. By the end of the 17th century, almost every scientist in Europe were convinced that Copernicus was right. Why? It was elegant (no epicycles) [1], it was politically exciting (it went against the doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church and was therefore especially attrative to reformers), and some of its followers (ever heard of Isaac Newton?) had come up with really cool ideas.

In other words, heliocentrism in the late 17th century had all the features that a popular programming language today might have [2]. But as a scientific theory, it remained unconfirmed, and its rival (geocentrism) remained unfalsified, even as the world embraced heliocentrism as the One True Theory.

Conclusive falsification of geocentrism, and thus compelling confirmation of heliocentrism, only arrived in 1838 with the first observation of parallax. That was almost 300 years after Copernicus first advocated heliocentrism, and over 100 years after almost everyone accepted it. For all those decades and centuries, people had been believing in heliocentrism without having tested it.

The history of science is rife with examples like this. Some theories are inherently difficult to test, so it can take a few decades, or even centuries, to collect conclusive experimental evidence. Sometimes you have to wait for others to develop the technology you need, just as heliocentrism had to wait for highly accurate telescopes to measure parallax. Because it costs a lot to develop such technologies, a theory without a critical mass of highly motivated followers is at risk of fizzling out before it can ever be tested.

This is an inevitable consequence of the fact that science depends on a bunch of hairless bipedal monkeys for its existence. When falsification takes a long time, humans tend to be influenced by political, philosophical, aesthetic, and even religious factors. And this isn't a Totally Evil Thing™, because if we weren't influenced by such factors, much fewer theories would ever make it to falsification. They would just fizzle out for lack of motivation.

How long has string theory been around? 50 years? And we're already being impatient with it? Remember how long we had to wait for Darwin's theory of evolution to become mainstream and well-supported by evidence? Remember how long it took for "driftists" (those who supported plate tectonics) and "fixists" (those who opposed it) to reach a consensus? 50 years is about as long as it takes to test a theory about the distant history of this planet using recent technology. How much longer do you think it will take to test a theory about the fundamental structure of the universe, when we can't even imagine the kind of technology we'd need in order to start testin'?

Copernicus waited 300 years. String theorists should expect to wait 500-1000 years, if not more. And we, the rest of the society, should strive to support such long-term endeavors to the best of our abilities [3]. It's not as if string theorists are asking us to build expensive underground facilities for them, right?

[1] The lack of epicycles was a particularly attractive feature because of the newly discovered moons of Jupiter. Too many levels of epicycles made the Ptolemaic model look rather inelegant.

[2] Elegant syntax, sexy community, and a cool standard library.

[3] That is, unless there's something so obviously fishy about a theory that the consensus is that it's not even worth trying to falsify. Intelligent design probably falls into this category.