Professor Shiraz Minwalla on what string theory actually is and why physicists didn't just wait for better experiments:
"You give up. You say, let's wait 1,000 years, then we'll have more experiment. And that may be a rational thing to do. But that's not how humans are."
So instead toy models. Find any consistent quantum theory of gravity you can construct. And consistency turns out to be a brutal filter:
"We take all the spectrum of particles in string theory, keep all the other masses fixed, change the mass of one. Just doing that would make the theory become nonsense."
"String theory is an attempt to find any consistent quantum mechanical theory that reduces to gravity at long distance."
And along the way AdS/CFT, black hole entropy, and something nobody expected:
"Who would have thought that the best way to do a calculation in hydrodynamics would actually be to do a calculation in gravity? But it's true."
@Kaju_Nut@ThomasVanRiet2 That would be great! I recall the string theory subreddit already has something along those lines. And for learning guidelines, there is a nicely organized string theory wiki put together by the Queen Mary group.
So, Inside-Out emotions are non-commutative! Can't we build a non-abelian group of them with a proper Cayley table? We need to add some more like "meh" as the unity, and define their inverses, associativity, closure...