Modern physics is misinterpreted quite often.
I still remember one of my "enlightened" humanities professor describing relativity and quantum mechanics. She would say stuff like "Einstein proved that everything is relative" then related it to philosophical or socialogical circumstance. But in reality, relativity is a physical theory that describes what happens to objects as they reach speeds a significant fraction of the speed of light. That's all. Period.
Quantum mechanics is another story. Sure, it's weird stuff, but people use it as an explanation for everything. If quantum mechanics opens the possibility of a billion true natures of reality, only one of which is right, then just because your new-agey idea of reality is one of those billion doesn't mean it's the right one.
Then string theory is particularly strange because it's almost an entirely useless theory to us. It's a theory, but it's unverifiable with our current technology, and many have argued that it has wasted the careers of some of today's brightest physicists. So really, not much can actually be said about string theory.
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