When the young sister of a nuclear physicist joins the U.S. Army and is sent to Iraq to assist in establishing greater control for American corporations in the Middle East; and the sister is among those killed by a suicide bomber fighting to protect his country and religion from foreign invasion; and the physicist has to hold his trembling mother at the funeral, and has to look into her devastated eyes and try to tell her things about honor and duty that ring all hollow and don't mean shit.

When that's going on — and some version of it is going on, always, somewhere on this planet — I think the idea that the universe may be subatomically composed of an infinite number of vibrating strings is so terribly beside the point.

Extra credit: What is the point?