"To situate “A Smooth Exit from Eternal Inflation?” in the scientific world in which it was written, the practice of theoretical physics is often an exercise in fabulism: you propose something new and strange that appears to fit with established theory and observations and then — this is the hard part — follow the ever-branching consequences of your new idea to see if there are any contradictions that might arise. After justifying those contradictions, you make or someone else makes a prediction, however outlandish or futuristic, and you wait for the moment between tomorrow and one hundred years from now...