A philandering string theorist is caught with another woman by his wife. “But darling,” he pleads, “I can explain everything!”
I didn’t invent the joke; it appeared in the satirical magazine The Onion. The amazing thing is that people got it. The person on the street knows that string theory – the idea that the ultimate building blocks of nature are quantised loops of string, not point-like elementary particles – is our leading candidate for a theory that would, indeed, “explain everything”.
Despite capturing the popular imagination, however, string theory has fallen on hard times lately, at least in the public…
