A guy I went to high school with (one of the THREE who scored perfect 800s on their SATs) is a physics professor at MIT, and just said in a high school reunion email he has no idea about space and the world and all, he just muddles through. He works on superstring theory, which I don't think I can even begin to understand. Although HE's never read a romance--
String theory is pretty interesting, and controversial, too, but then, most revolutionary ways to understand the world are. The few string theory papers I've read gave me a headache and dreams about vibrating party string (comes in a can and you spray it at parties... kids love it) so I'm guessing it didn't totally take. Today NPR interviewed a physicist about his dark matter research. He says it's moving too fast to be right that it's some sort of Big Bang residue (my words, there) but the paper's not even peer reviewed yet. Be cool to read it when it's out though.
As for physicists reading Romance, I think that's probably a side effect of standing too near the cyclotron or maybe not ducking when it's your turn to play with the particle accelerator. I'm sure he would if he could.
