From an outside view, such a plan seems unlikely to succeed. Science moves forward by data, engineering moves forward by trying things out. This is just intuition though, I would guess there is a reasonable amount of empirical evidence to be gained by looking at theoretical work and seeing how often it runs awry of unexpected facts about the world (I’m embarrassingly unsure of what the answer would be here; added to my list of things to try to figure out).
From an outside view, such a plan seems unlikely to succeed. Science moves forward by data, engineering moves forward by trying things out. This is just intuition though, I would guess there is a reasonable amount of empirical evidence to be gained by looking at theoretical work and seeing how often it runs awry of unexpected facts about the world (I’m embarrassingly unsure of what the answer would be here; added to my list of things to try to figure out).