'Stripes' code for a peculiar electronic ordering phenomenon generic
in doped Mott-insulator. After a long history of controversy these are
now generally recognized as the main competitor of superconductivity
in the cuprate superconductors. I will tell the story from a
historical and subjective viewpoint: how it all started by an
accidental discovery by a young theorist on a friday afernoon in 1987;
how the idea inspired a brilliant experimentalist to start to dig in a
place where nobody dared to go; how the stripes turned magically into
guinea pigs for completely novel modes of experimentation to probe
strongly interacting quantum matter, culminating in Abbamonte's
synchrotron experiments and the Mott-maps of Davis et al.; why the
idea of stripe quantum liquids is very much alive but still
controversial; why one has to grasp some strange duality
transformations in order to understand what has to be done in order to
nail down these quantum stripes experimentally.
