Sure, it's not experimental physics, but as long as it's _bound by reality_ somehow, it's still science.
So the way a good physicist operates is to say "fine, I can't do the experiment, but let me see what is allowed by current experimental bounds". This is good. It's also an idea as old as science itself.
In contrast it's tremendously ironic that physics poopooers like Sabine and that other peter woit guy typically choose to work on special-relativity-violating theories, which are immediately outside of the bounds that the experiments we do have impose. Do you understand what I'm saying? This person is claiming "we can't directly probe a string therefore string theory is religion", but then she works on something which is worse than religion - something which we know is experimentally disproven. (I'm talking about the loop quantum gravities, and entropic gravities and so on and on - they're all inconsistent with one of the most toughroughly experimentally tested laws, special relativity). If they weren't so good at convincing the public that no one knows anything, their tragedy would be comic.