  I review at a non-technical level the use of the gauge-string duality to
study aspects of heavy ion collisions, with special emphasis on the trailing
string calculation of heavy quark energy loss. I include some brief
speculations on how variants of the trailing string construction could provide
a toy model of black hole formation and evaporation. This essay is an invited
contribution to "Forty Years of String Theory" and is aimed at philosophers and
historians of science as well as physicists.
