I used to think the string theorists were a bunch of charlatans. But matching first-principles entropy at the event horizon gives me pause. Even if they are all

I used to think the string theorists were a bunch of charlatans. But matching first-principles entropy at the event horizon gives me pause. Even if they are all wrong about anything beyond the Standard Model, they have a sort of encoding of it in its entirety that ought to suggest places to look for interesting phenomena. Maybe the math is too hard to predict what happens in such places, but they will have done something useful in pointing at them. It's not exactly science, as such, but not everything useful has to be. (I gather that in the stringy black hole model, there is no actual space inside the horizon, so no need for a singularity. I may have misunderstood.)