<quote><p>"String theory" is actually a collection of several competing theories and this theory appears to be another version.</p></quote>

Actually this is not true. The scientific consensus is that the "different" string theories formulated in the early 80s are just different realizations or limits of the same underlying theory and are all related by different dualities (one-to-one correspondences). On the other hand Horava gravity is a completely different kind of proposal: it is a modification of General Relativity at high energies in order to make it "quantisable", as opposed to Einstein's GR.

Horava-Lifshitz gravity is an alternative to String theory only as far as it is a theory of quantum gravity (though its renormalisability hasn't been checked throughly yet). For now it doesn't aim to describe the other forces of Nature so it does not replace string theory as a proposal for a Theory of Everything. Also, it's not clear for now whether Horava-Lifshitz gravity could maybe be realized in string theory.

Another note: the original proposal of Horava is clearly ruled out experimentally because of an unwanted (i.e. unobserved) extra mode at low energies. There have been extensions of the original proposal that cured this problem, but which haven't been studied enough to be compared with other astrophysical and cosmological observations.

I'm shocked at how easily one can hack a kitchen knife to make a deadly weapon!

>> Would you be happier with a 1:1 death toll? can't an army be efficient?

> Yeah, the logic is just bizarre. Whoever wins = bad guy.

But it's an interesting intellectual exercise since usually we have

whoever wins = good guys

Remember: history is written by the winners...

I wouldn't call Lynx comprehensive...

As several others pointed out, this "news" comes again and again, often in order to complain about string theory and its funny ideas.

I just want to make a couple of points more precise:

Just like any theory in physics, string theory has many solutions (estimates vary around 10^500 or more, rather than 10100, and grow as we find new ones). In newtonian gravitation any conic section is a possible solution of the two body problem with appropriate parameters, but only one describes the motion of the earth around the sun (neglecting the other planets). Once we picked (or measured) the correct solution we can predict the future trajectory with an accuracy determined by the accuracy of the first measurement.

The problem in string theory is that there are many solution which, at the low energy which can be probed by current experiments, look very similar to each other, so it is difficult to determine which is the correct one.

Another problem in modern physics is the very tiny value of the cosmological constant. So the multiverse theory is a proposal taking advantage of the first problem to solve the second one: since there are so many solutions (with different values of the cosmological constant) it seems plausible that there should be one (or many) that has the tiny value which is observed.

This proposal is controversial in the string theory community mainly because it is viewed as "giving up" trying to find an explanation for the cosmological constant problem. On the other hand some people use it to push forward ideas (the anthropic principle) to counter the claims of intelligent design.

There is an excellent book on all this by Leonard Susskind, one of the promoters of the proposal.

Then, at least for games, performance is VERY important, so if Windows 7 doesn't compare to Win XP in terms of performance the gaming argument doesn't help anymore.