This was a conversation to give the phrase “theoretical physics” a whole new meaning. My friends and I were the most outrageously unqualified group of string theorists ever assembled. In fact, we could far more aptly have been called shoestring theorists: virtuosos of developing elaborate hypotheses based on vanishingly small amounts of information. The Chicago Public Radio show This American Life once dedicated an entire episode to this kind of mild confabulation, in the course of which they did us all a favor by coining a vastly better term for it. Actually, it’s more accurate to say that
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