Radin Dardashti (MCMP/LMU) gives a talk at the Workshop on "Why trust a Theory?" (7-9 December, 2015) titled "Physics without Experiments?". Abstract: Most of the fundamental theories in modern physics are relevant at energy scales or length scales where empirical access is currently hard to obtain. Accounts of theory assessment within the philosophy of science literature are, however, usually concerned with the relation between the theory and the empirical data they predict. So these “traditional” approaches seem not to allow for theory assessment in these cases. Recently, Richard Dawid has developed an account of non-empirical theory assessment, which uses evidence not entailed by the theory to assess the theory. In this talk I present a problem-oriented perspective on these issues, which allows to better assess the possibilities and limitations of non-empirical theory assessment.