A recent article published in Time magazine which was critical of string theory laid out what I thought was some interesting reasoning for why string theory wasn't acceptable science, in the opinion of some.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/pr...226142,00.html

I'll quote a short bit from the text just to provide some context.

With specific reference to string theories supposition that there are alternate universes differentiated by probability fields, the article had this to say.

(Maybe, they've argued, there really are an infinite number of universes--an idea that's currently in vogue among some astronomers as well--and some version of the theory describes each of them. That means any prediction, however outlandish, has a chance of being valid for at least one universe, and no prediction, however sensible, might be valid for all of them.)i

So, in other words, one of the big problems with string theory is that it means that the laws of the universe are based on context. Change the context and the laws of the universe change. Go to a different universe and it's likely to be governed by different rules.

It's funny how a principle so fundamental to NLP and, for the last century, theoretical physics is still meeting with such dogged resistance.

In my experience, people often tend to seek certainty and resist the idea of uncertainty. It seems that they seem to want some things to say the same all the time no matter what and in every context. They want the map to *be* the territory.

Even in NLP, I know people who try to use it or teach it as dogma with strict cause-and-effect relationships and rigid this-means-that thinking. In my experience, the more we open ourselves up to the idea of reality being subjective, the closer we come to actually understanding the world around us.

I think that there are some problems with string theory, just as there are problems with relativity and quantum theory. And I personally believe that it will eventually be refined and replaced with something else (which will, no doubt, be, in turn, refined and replaced by something else after that, and so on). However, I don't think it's going to be replaced by nice, simple, easily-testable science with firm and reassuring absolutes.

The days of Newton are, I think, behind us. The map is not the territory. The only absolute might be that there *are* no absolutes, depending on the context...

Be Well,

Michael Perez