At first blush, this article seems to say that there's a solid hypothesis for which the math works consistently, and they know what they want to do in order to test that hypothesis. It's just a matter of designing and performing experiments.

But then, I read this:

[Co-author] Weller-Davies added: “A delicate interplay must exist if quantum particles such as atoms are able to bend classical spacetime. There must be a fundamental trade-off between the wave nature of atoms, and how large the random fluctuations in spacetime need to be.”

I know atoms aren't "particles," and I'm pretty damned sure they're also not quanta.

So, we're just calling anything a "theory" nowadays? How about the scientific method? Or is that just too much work for anybody in a post-Einstein world?

if everything is classical, a whole lot of stuff is going to be tough to explain like quantum superposition as it's used in modern qubits, or quantum tunneling experiments that have proven effective. Heck I'm even interested in the double slit experiment explanation in the context of these fluctuations from the paper