[taneq]

Good question, made me stop and think about it!

The difference is that in Pascal's Wager, the proposition is not a priori falsifiable, and so you cannot assign a reasonable expected cost (ie. taking probability into account) to either decision.

In the case of a 26-year-old making testable assertions about the nature of spacetime (right down to the assertion that space and time are interconnected), there's a known (if potentially large) cost to testing the assertions.