There’s a legendary bit of wisdom that applies just as well to theoretical physics as it does to the drug culture from which it arose : “Don’t get high on your own supply.” While theoretical physicists are famous for coming up with extraordinary, creative, exotic scenarios for what may yet be possible in the Universe, there’s a great danger in buying into such an idea, and thinking that it’s likely, before a sufficient amount of supporting evidence has been found in favor of it. This was the fallacy that led to the rise of elegant, beautiful, and compelling scenarios — grand unification, supersymmetry, extra dimensions, and string theory — whose predictions simply don’t appear to match experimental reality in any measurable way. The danger isn’t in having and developing an idea that’s speculative, but rather in believing in it so strongly that you reach for it as your go-to explanation whenever you see even a tiny hint that could potentially support it.…