Love, Theoretically by Ali Hazelwood

            Like maybe there’s a but?

            “I cannot overstate how impressed I am with the scientific output you’ve produced in such a short period.”

            There’s definitely a but.

            “You’ll be an asset to whatever institution you choose, and MIT would be the perfect home for you. I want to be honest and admit that based on what I have seen, you should be the person we hire.”

             . . . But?

            “But.”

            I knew it. I knew it. I knew it, but my heart drops to the bottom of my stomach anyway.

            “Elsie, I asked you to meet alone because I feel that it would be better if you knew about the . . . politics that are currently at play.”

            “Politics?” I shouldn’t be surprised. STEM academia is 98 percent politics and 1 percent science (the rest, I suspect, “I Should Be Writing” memes). “What do you mean?”

            “You might have several job offers, and I want to make sure that you choose us despite . . . whatever might happen during your interview.”

            I frown. “Whatever might happen?”

            She sighs. “As you know, in the past few years there has been some . . . some acrimony, between theoretical and experimental physicists.”

            I hold back a snort. Acrimony is a nice ten-dollar word to say that if the Purge were announced at this very moment, three-quarters of the world’s experimentalists would ring the theorists’ doorbells with their freshly sharpened machetes. Of course it would all be in vain: they’d find the theorists long gone, already swinging their scimitars in the experimentalists’ front yards.

            Yes, in this much-visited scenario of mine, we theorists have the cooler weapons.

            We’re just different breeds. Apples and oranges. Dwarves and elves. Cool scientists and less-cool scientists. We theorists use math, construct models, explain the whys and hows of nature. We are thinkers. Experimentalists . . . well, they like to fuck around and find out. Build things and get their hands dirty. Like engineers. Or three-year-olds at the sandbox.

            Theorists think they’re smarter (spoiler alert: we are), and experimentalists think they’re more useful (re-spoiler re-alert: they are not). It makes for some . . . Yeah. Acrimony.

            Monica, thank the universe and the subatomic particles it’s made of, is a theorist. We exchange a long, loaded, understanding look. “I am aware,” I say.

            “Good. And you might have heard that Jonathan Smith-Turner has recently joined MIT?”

            I stiffen. “I had not.”

            “But you are familiar with Jonathan Smith-Turner. And with his . . . article.”

            It’s not a question. Monica is wise and fully aware that there is no dimension, no parallel universe, no hypothetical self-contained plane of existence in which a theoretical physicist wouldn’t know who he is.

            Because Jonathan Smith-Turner is an experimentalist—no, the experimentalist. And several years ago, when I was in middle school and he was probably a grown-ass man who should have known better, he did something horrible. Something unforgivable. Something abominable.

            He made theoretical physicists look dumb.

            Driven by what I can only assume was bitterness, an overabundance of free time, and involuntary celibacy, he set out to prove to the world that . . . actually, I don’t know what he wanted to prove. But he wrote a scientific article on quantum mechanics that was just full enough of jargon and math to sound like it was written by a theorist.

            Except that the article was completely made up. Bogus. A parody, if you will. That turned into a prank when he submitted it to Annals of Theoretical Physics, our most prestigious journal, and waited. Rubbing his hands together evilly, one can only assume.

            And that’s where things went wrong. Because despite undergoing supposedly rigorous peer review, the article was accepted. And published. And it stayed published for several weeks, or at least until shit hit the fan—in the form of a blog post by someone likely affiliated with Smith-Turner, back in the olden times when blogging was a thing.

            “Is Theoretical Physics Pseudoscience?” had been the title. The post, which detailed how Smith-Turner had gotten a bunch of nonsense published in the most respected theory journal, was even worse. “Has the field of physics lost its way? . . . Is it all made up?” And my personal favorite: “If theoretical physics is gibberish, is it fair to compensate theorists with federal tax money?”