Incredible smart people have a tendency to fall in love with there ideas and the beauty of the created concepts. Im pretty sure that physics as a field has the same problem with architectural astronauts as software engineering has.

Im not criticizing hard working mathematicians and physicists like your friend- the solution he found sounds rather elegant, and the results are testable. And you are right about having no dogmas when it comes to approaching the riddles of tomorrow- and yet, if all work you do is untestable- you are not a scientist.