The author of this article is Brian Greene, who is the leading explainer of string theory to mass audiences. He has taken on the challenge of explaining a kind of physics that many see as unintuitive and messy, and this article is a kind of "checking in" on the health of string theory for Smithsonian readers. So cut him some slack about the title, and about the French horn analogy. The gist of it is "Did string theory math explode and leave a big mess instead of finding something experimentally verifiable?" and his answer is "No. Maybe the varying options for extra-spatial dimensions in string theory explains why we have this set of cosmological parameters and not some other set."