Like I said, I'm pretty sure you're not interested in anything except having the last word.
@Nicodeamus has contributed a lot of interesting stuff based on actual experience which you've barely acknowledged, except to dismiss it.
Exceptions don't prove rules, they disprove them. If you did any proper science you might understand this... But even then, Einstein isn't the only one, Stephen Hawking's early work (not so sure about later stuff) was pretty much entirely theoretical.
Physics abounds in theory-only stuff. Sure there is an abundance of data available in recent years, so many papers do make use of at least some observational / experimental data, but some don't. There's no rule saying they must or must not.
But physics is also not the only science. Departments like biology will rely heavily on experimental or observational data, not much "pure theory" there, but lots of what the humanities departments publish will have very little of what you might call "experimental data", though it doesn't fit nicely into what we think of as theory / practical in the hard sciences.
Edit: But that's also not really either here nor there. The point (I think) that
@Nicodeamus was originally trying to make was that there are a lot of low-quality papers published at many universities around the world, which while technically novel contributions, aren't very useful. This wasn't to cast aspersions at pure theory or mathematics which doesn't appear useful immediately. I know this because I've been guilty of publishing one or two of these myself, for the purposes of graduating from my postgraduate studies.
bwahaha
