Old style containers to keep string.

Now - my Grandmothers had a 'string theory'. Their theory was, if you took some string off one thing, you should save it in a ball, so you could put it back on to something else. They even had really cool little hand made containers that they could store the string in for future use.

But that isn't the string theory you hear about these days. It is nothing quite so simplistic I am afraid, but the following video is the best interpretation or explanation that I have heard thus far.

If that has you stressing out trying to understand, or overwhelmed at the possibilities it presents - you can stick with my Grandmothers version -- it won't do you any harm. No one has really got it figured out yet anyway. I like to contemplate these things, but I also like to leave the testing to those who know how. And who is to know whether it will be shelved for some new theory along the road. How many times in human history have people believed theories that were proven to be wrong at a later date?  That the world was flat was one such idea.  That one was believed to be true for a very long time.


The thing is - if we do not conjecture and discuss and put forward the pros and cons and do the theoretical testing of ideas, we do not learn. We do not change, and that would be in discord with nature, as nothing in nature stays the same. Life is constant change - nature is constant change. The change may be too slow for us to see or experience in our short life time, or it may take place very quickly, happening millions of times within the length of a human life. From larvae to caterpillar to butterfly for instance ..... or on the other side of the coin, a chunk of a mountain splits away from where it has hung for several lifetimes, and suddenly is spread across the valley as rubble.

There are a few things that interest me about string theory as it is presented in this generation. One is that it seemingly ties together a few other ideas presented in the past, and makes sense of them. Another is the concept of taking the end point of a string and stretching it like a membrane. It has me thinking about the Buddhist idea of holding the mind to being 'one-pointed and spacious'. But I think the part I like the best is the idea of relating those membranes to flat screen televisions with different scenes on each tv, all operating at the same time. Now, that is a concept I can envision and it even makes some sense in those terms.

But I still have feelings of fond attachment to my Grandmothers' string theory too. I think I'll keep it for a while until they get the other one figured out.   ;  )