Clearly you must know little about relativity if you think it was just a theory up to that point. Protip: Einstein wasn't a prominent enough scientist to help kickstart the manhattan project because of his wild hair and womanizing. He did a shitload of relativity work in the '10's and was able to prove several parts of it, and certainly didn't have much trouble unifying the rest of it with mainstream physics. About the only one that had much difficulty was the idea of an unbalanced equation (and he wasn't the first to note this), and he even managed to make that work all over japan's face with a little help from Mr. Oppenheimer & Co. So, essentially, it took ABOUT TWO DECADES for his ideas to be put to practical use (For the record, it's been 3 since Kaku started, where's my quantum reactor?) It's why even though it's been damn near a century since he penned some of his career making work you'd be hard pressed to find someone that doesn't feel the guy really knew what he was on about. If anything, further research adds a bit of credit to his ideas. And his papers being so filled with asterisks makes it such that he was aware that physics is a complicated field and there's always real/theoretical contradictions. Kaku might be smart, but I see absolutely nothing in his career that makes him able to hold a candle to someone who made such sizable contributions to not just physics but science as a whole that some people literally can't even wake up in the morning without using his theories.
He saw something then rewrote string theory mildly to fit it. See, contrary to what this article states (science publications are required to play nice), string theory as it stood didn't really explain all of what happened. So he had to make an adjustment or two. He'd have to write considerably less if he subscribed to one of the other more viable theories. Because they say THE SAME DAMN THING and actually have the physics to back it up. String theory, since it functions on a lot of screwy reasoning, is easy to adjust to whatever you feel like.
"Oh hey, we can't explain how quantum superconductors function"
"STRINGS!!!!"
"Sure, why not."
Oh hey, Newton totally discovered tachyons, brah! See, if we just rewrite his theory of gravity a bit....
OVER FIVE HUNDRED SADNESSES.
Well, on the plus side you can probably locate a vanilla NTSC Borderlands for less than the DLC stack or GOTY, I guess.
