Anyone who can make string theory accessible to a mass audience is pretty good in my book. In this NY Times piece, he celebrates famous equation E=mc². He thinks about physics the way I think about economics. Understand the math, but don't consider your understanding complete until you can tell the story. We call that intuition. And I wouldn't trust an economist (or a string theorist) who doesn't think it's important.
Einstein's derivation of E = mc² was wholly mathematical. I know his derivation, as does just about anyone who has taken a course in modern physics. Nevertheless, I consider my understanding of a result incomplete if I rely solely on the math. Instead, I've found that thorough understanding requires a mental image - an analogy or a story - that may sacrifice some precision but captures the essence of the result.
Here's a story for E = mc². Two equally strong and skilled jousters, riding identical horses and gripping identical (blunt) lances, head toward each other at an identical speed. As they pass, each thrusts his lance across his breastplate toward his opponent, slamming blunt end into blunt end. Because they're equally matched, neither lance pushes farther than the other, and so the referee calls it a draw.
This story contains the essence of Einstein's discovery. Let me explain.
Unfortunately, some mathematical descriptions simply have no coherent story behind them, at least none that we can understand. Such are the conundrums of quantum mechanics.
From one point of view mathematical descriptions are idealizations, never completely provable, for always there is experimental error—or so we claim in order for our mathematical models to have elegance and security.
I say all this with slight tongue in cheek. What amuses me most is the degree of error that various disciplines allow both within their models and in terms of verification.
While economics likes to admire its own formal mathematical structure, unfortunately it seems to be, of all sciences, the most removed from real verification.
Well, sometimes it seems that economics more closely resembles quantum physics than Newtonian physics. Thus, approaching economic issues with Newtonian-style models (e.g. a force of "F" applied to an object will accelerate the object in inverse proportion to its mass) runs into the same difficulties that the physicists run into when applying the physics of Newton to things that move very fast or things that are very small.