This is classic Scott Aaronson - in fact, he's suggested on more than one occasion that we should adopt 'NP-hard problems are infeasible for the physical universe to solve' as a law of thermodynamics, arguing that the evidence for this is at least as good as other laws and that a disproof of this would be just as revolutionary.
Other Aaronson classics include "Who can name the bigger number?" [1], "Shor, I'll do it" (his layman's explanation of Shor's algorithm for finding hidden abelian subgroups) [2], "Is Quantum Mechanics An Island In Theoryspace?" [3], and his blog turned class turned book "Quantum Computing Since Democritus" [4]. But really there's a ton of gold. He has a really neat explanation of the AKS primality testing algorithm [5] and modeled an imaginary easier-to-build (?) less-powerful-but-probably-more-powerful-than-classic-computers computing machine based on the quantum effects of light [6].
In general his blog tends to accumulate a lot of drama and controversy in its comments (because Prof. Aaronson is very opinionated), which he handles very hilariously.
It's worth following him over at Shtetl-Optimized [7]. MIT was smart to have given him tenure.
Aaronson has a gift for popularization, but the fact of the matter is, mathematicians can be astoundingly impractical. Practically speaking, NP hard problems are solved constantly, at least in an approximate sense, by physical reality and computer algorithms; soap bubbles, chemical dynamics, airline scheduling. The exact solution to any problem is uninteresting, just as the exact value of a real number is uninteresting.
Scott Aaronson I think himself would agree, as do I. He has some legitimate counterpoints though too on NP-Hard problems being solved. He points out the canonical instance of such problems "folding protein" (chemical dynamics) can not really count, as proteins that misfold (pryons) are in extremely dangerous molecules: evolution has heavily selected to find proteins that it can fold quickly and reliably. He'll also point out that rocks don't find global minimums - that there are in fact a plethora of these examples. He tests soap bubbles and finds many 'easy' instances where it fail. Namely, he's responded to that criticism countless times - once with an actual physical experiment (the paper itself announces).
It very likely is interesting to see to what degree other physical processes can approximately compute otherwise hard problems. It's just not fair to pick Aaronson to do it; he himself would be the first to admit that it isn't his area and that you'd want someone like Champagne to do it.
In summary, yeah definitely his work is on a very theoretical and abstract level. He proudly admits this. Nobody would be more excited about others performing experiments than he would be.
Other Aaronson classics include "Who can name the bigger number?" [1], "Shor, I'll do it" (his layman's explanation of Shor's algorithm for finding hidden abelian subgroups) [2], "Is Quantum Mechanics An Island In Theoryspace?" [3], and his blog turned class turned book "Quantum Computing Since Democritus" [4]. But really there's a ton of gold. He has a really neat explanation of the AKS primality testing algorithm [5] and modeled an imaginary easier-to-build (?) less-powerful-but-probably-more-powerful-than-classic-computers computing machine based on the quantum effects of light [6].
In general his blog tends to accumulate a lot of drama and controversy in its comments (because Prof. Aaronson is very opinionated), which he handles very hilariously.
It's worth following him over at Shtetl-Optimized [7]. MIT was smart to have given him tenure.
[1] http://www.scottaaronson.com/writings/bignumbers.html
[2] http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=208
[3] http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/island.pdf
[4] http://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/
[5] http://www.scottaaronson.com/writings/prime.pdf
[6] http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/optics.pdf
[7] http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/