[kylemaxwell]

The key point, and one the author believes applies just as well to computer science, is:

He was insufficiently confident of the power of the intellectual tools he already possessed and did not drive his thought to the very end because he felt instinctively that new ideas and new methods were necessary to go further than he and his students had already gone. Some may call it a lack of faith, but in my opinion it was more a turning away from the hard, crude methods of theoretical physics into a mystical realm of broad intuition.

In my own field of network security, I think that's largely true: we have a lot of analytical tools that we haven't applied sufficiently well, largely because people are not interested or educated in the sorts of theoretical tools we could apply (ML or graph theory, for example).

How well this applies to theoretical research is outside my expertise, though...

[jmj42]

It's funny you should mention graph theory and network security. I'm involved in cyber security research, though more on the operations side of security than networks. However, our research group does do quite a bit of work on the network side. Most of it's focused on SCADA networks, but there's a couple of really cool tools (read startups) that have come out of our group that lean heavily on graph theory.

NP-View[1] maps connections. That is, If HostA can reach HostB, and HostB can reach HostC, is there a path from HostC to HostA.

Veriflow (which I know far less about) is a large topology mapping tool.

[1] http://www.network-perception.com/ [2] http://www.veriflowsystems.com/