From: Avatar Polymorph (avatarpolymorph@hotmail.com)
Date: Mon Sep 02 2002 - 00:23:03 MDT
The following BBC programme was aired in Australia yesterday, transcript
comes from:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2001/parallelunitrans.shtml
The show claimed that a collision between two m-branes or universes caused
our Big Bang, with the distribution of matter due to the colliding "rippled"
m-branes. Also claimed we could make universes in the lab which would very
quickly split off.
Avatar Polymorph
============
NARRATOR (DILLY BARLOW): Imagine you could find an explanation for
everything in the Universe, from the smallest events possible to the
biggest. This is the dream which has captivated the most brilliant
scientists since Einstein. Now they think they may have found it. The theory
is breathtaking and it has an extraordinary conclusion: that the Universe we
live in is not the only one.
MICHIO KAKU (City University of New York): That there could be an infinite
number of universes each with a different law of physics. Our Universe could
be just one bubble floating in an ocean of other bubbles.
NARRATOR: Everything you are about to hear is true, at least in this
Universe it is. For almost a hundred years science has been haunted by a
dark secret: that there might be mysterious hidden worlds beyond our human
senses. Mystics had long claimed there were such places. They were, they
said, full of ghosts and spirits. The last thing science wanted was to be
associated with such superstition, but ever since the 1920s physicists have
been trying to make sense of an uncomfortable discovery. When they tried to
pinpoint the exact location of atomic particles like electrons they found it
was utterly impossible. They had no single location.
ALAN GUTH (Massachusetts Institute of Technology): When one studies the
properties of atoms one found that the reality is far stranger than anybody
would have invented in the form of fiction. Particles really do have the
possibility of, in some sense, being in more than one place at one time.
NARRATOR: The only explanation which anyone could come up with is that the
particles don't just exist in our Universe. They flit into existence in
other universes, too and there are an infinite number of these parallel
universes, all of them slightly different. In effect, there's a parallel
universe in which Napoleon won the Battle of Waterloo. In another the
British Empire held on to its American colony. In one you were never born.
ALAN GUTH: Essentially anything that can happen does happen in one of the
alternatives which means that superimposed on top of the Universe that we
know of is an alternative universe where Al Gore is President and Elvis
Presley is still alive.
NARRATOR: This idea was so uncomfortable that for decades scientists
dismissed it, but in time parallel universes would make a spectacular
comeback. This time they'd be different, they'd be even stranger than Elvis
being alive. There's an old proverb that says: be careful what you wish for
in case your wish comes true. The most fervent wish of physics has long been
that it could find a single elegant theory which would sum up everything in
our Universe. It was this dream which would lead unwittingly to the
rediscovery of parallel universes. It's a dream which has driven the work of
almost every physicist.
MICHIO KAKU: On the ice rink I am communing with the fundamental laws of
physics. At the instant of creation we believe that the Universe was
symmetrical, it was pure, it was elegant. Without friction Newtonian laws
are laid bare, simple, elegant and beautiful, pure, noble, elemental, just
like it was at the beginning of time. When I was a child of eight my
elementary school teacher came in the room and announced that a great
scientist had just died and on the evening news that night everyone was
flashing pictures of his desk with the unfinished manuscript of his greatest
work. I wanted to know what was in that manuscript. Years later I found out
that it was the attempt of Albert Einstein to create a Theory of Everything,
a theory of the Universe and I wanted to be part of that quest.
NARRATOR: Einstein never achieved his goal of a Theory of Everything, but
again and again others have thought they were on the brink of this ultimate
achievement. This was always wishful thinking - until recently. A revolution
occurred in the 1980s. In universities across the world new ideas in science
streamed forth. Finally, it seemed, everything in the Universe was about to
be explained. In Britain the famous physicist Stephen Hawking, was even so
confident he claimed physics was ready to read the mind of God. There would
soon be no big scientific problems left. One idea was the most revolutionary
of all. It seemed a sure fire Theory of Everything and captured the
imagination of scientists like Burt Ovrut. It was all to do with string.
BURT OVRUT (University of Pennsylvania): It has been thought since physics
began that matter was made up of particles. We had changed that point of
view now. We now think that matter is made up of little strings.
NARRATOR: For years it had been an article of faith that all the matter in
the Universe was made of tiny, invisible particles. Now suddenly the
particle physicists discovered they'd been studying the wrong thing. The
particles were really tiny, invisible strings. The theory was called String
Theory and it maintained that matter emanated from these tiny strings like
music.
BURT OVRUT: You can think of it as a violin string or a guitar string. If
you pluck it in a certain way you get a certain frequency, but if you pluck
it a different way you can get more frequencies on this string and in fact
you have different notes. Nature is made of all the little notes, the
musical notes, that are played on these super-strings.
MICHIO KAKU: All of a sudden we realised the Universe is a symphony and the
laws of physics are harmonies of a super-string.
NARRATOR: String Theory was so provocative and downright weird that it
immediately began to sound like a perfect Theory of Everything.
BURT OVRUT: It certainly did sweep us all by storm. It's a beautiful,
elegant and simple theory and a number of people said well if it's so
elegant and simple why don't we try to use it as the basic unifying
principle for nature.
NARRATOR: But if String Theory was to become Einstein's missing Theory of
Everything it would have to pass one test. It would have to explain a rather
special event: the birth of the Universe. The origins of the Universe had
always been the special subject of the cosmologists who studied the big
world of stars and galaxies. They, too, felt they were on the verge of a
great triumph, a complete understanding of how the world had begun. They'd
long known things had started with a giant explosion - the Big Bang - but by
now cosmologists had refined the idea. They had worked backwards in time
from the present day, closer and closer to the instant of the Big Bang.
Their work was incredibly precise.
PAUL STEINHARDT (Princeton University): We have confidence in extrapolating
back from the present to when the first stars and galaxies formed and the
Universe was only a billion years old, or extrapolating back farther to when
the first atoms were formed, when the Universe was a few hundred thousand
years old, or when the first nuclei formed when the Universe was only a few
seconds old.
ALAN GUTH: Physics was now actually ready to talk about these bizarre
sounding events in the Universe, fractions of a second and even billionths
and billionths and billionths of a second, 10-35 seconds after the instant
of the Big Bang. Absolutely fantastic.
NARRATOR: If everything in the Universe was to be explained then String
Theory and the Big Bang would now seamlessly merge and they'd complement
each other perfectly. After all, one concerned the birth of the Universe and
the other all the matter in it. It was surely a foregone conclusion. Physics
seemed to be on the edge of glory, but it all went terribly wrong. Try as
they might they just couldn't get the two ideas to merge and then, after 10
years of struggling, something even worse happened: their two pet theories
now began to self-destruct. The first problem appeared with the Big Bang.
The cosmologists had assumed that as they worked backwards in time they
would eventually work their way back all the way to the beginning of the Big
Bang. There would be no awkward gaps, but after years of end-less refinement
there was one gap which refused to disappear, the most important one of all.
ALAN GUTH: In spite of the fact that we call it the Big Bang Theory it
really says absolutely nothing about the Big Bang. It doesn't tell us what
banged, why it banged, what caused it to bang. It doesn't even describe,
doesn't really allow us to predict what the conditions are immediately after
this bang.
MICHIO KAKU: The fundamental problem of cosmology is that the laws of
physics as we know them break down at the instant of the Big Bang. Well some
people say what's wrong with that, what's wrong with having the laws of
physics collapse? Well for a physicist this is a disaster. All our lives
we've dedicated to the proposition that the Universe obeys knowable laws,
laws that can be written down in the language of mathematics and here we
have the centrepiece of the Universe itself, a missing piece beyond physical
law.
NARRATOR: The very beginning of the Big Bang was the single biggest mystery
in all of cosmology. It was called the singularity.
PAUL STEINHARDT: When you extrapolate Einstein's general Theory of
Relativity back to the beginning you discover what we call a singularity, a
cosmic singularity, which is to say that the equations blow up.
NARRATOR: But the problem with the Big Bang was soon overshadowed. The
strings were in trouble, too. The hope had been that String Theory would
evolve into the single definitive explanation for the Universe, but as more
and more people worked on it something puzzling happened. The physicists
found a second version of it and then a third. Soon they had found five
different String Theories. That wasn't single and it didn't sound very
definitive.
BURT OVRUT: Five, even though it's not a very large number, is too large for
us because we would like to have a more unique theory than that and this
definitely was a problem, was a great crisis, so a lot of time was spent
studying those individual five theories, but in the back of our minds always
was why are there five of these things, shouldn't there only be one?
NARRATOR: String Theory had begun to unravel. It seemed as if the dream of a
Theory of Everything was as far away as ever.
MICHIO KAKU: Cynics began to come out and say that String Theory is too
hard, it's a dead end, it's simply not the way to go and it's not the Theory
of Everything, it's the theory of nothing.
NARRATOR: But just as the scientists were about to give up hope, a new and
startling discovery would be made. This would inspire them to begin their
quest again and force them at last to confront their least popular ides:
parallel universes. When String Theory fell apart, not everyone was
distraught. Some people even seemed to relish the fact.
MICHAEL DUFF (University of Michigan): If String Theory really was this
so-called Theory of Everything five theories of everything seems like an
embarrassment of riches.
NARRATOR: Michael Duff had been the rising star of an earlier idea called
super gravity. String Theory had displaced it and almost destroyed Duff's
career.
MICHAEL DUFF: Physics tend to be dictated by fad and fashion. There are the
gurus who dictate the direction in which new ideas grow. It was a very
lonely time in many ways. When I tried to get graduate students interested
many of them would say well look, you may be right and you may be wrong, but
if I work in super gravity I'm not going to find a job.
NARRATOR: What made the experience of the super gravity guys so galling was
that their theory wasn't so very different from String Theory to begin with.
In fact, the main disagreement between them was a point of detail which, to
outsiders, could seem like nitpicking. It was about the number of dimensions
in the Universe. We normally think of ourselves as living in a
three-dimensional world. We can move in three ways: left or right, up or
down, and forwards and backwards, but physics liked adding extra dimensions.
Einstein suggested time should be a fourth dimension. Then someone suggested
a fifth special dimension and then a sixth. The numbers just kept growing.
The extra dimensions were spaces in the Universe which we could never
perceive. Most were microscopically small, but scientists believed they were
really there. String Theory had been convinced there were in total exactly
10 dimensions.
BURT OVRUT: Now if you have a little oscillating string it has to have
enough room to oscillate properly and when one works this out mathematically
you find it, it just got a very clear answer. It had to be in 10 dimensional
space.
MICHIO KAKU: Ten dimensions.
BURT OVRUT: Nine spatial dimensions and one time.
NARRATOR: Super gravity though had been convinced there were exactly eleven
dimensions.
MICHAEL DUFF: The equations of super gravity took their simplest and most
elegant form when written in this 11 dimensional framework.
MICHIO KAKU: There was a war between the tenth dimension and the eleventh
dimension. In the 10-dimensional bandwagon we had string theorists, hundreds
of them, working to tease out all the properties of the known universe from
one framework: a vibrating string and then we had this small band of
outcasts, outlaws, working in the eleventh dimension.
NARRATOR: While String Theory was in its ascendancy, few took seriously the
eleventh dimension, but the super gravity guys never gave up hope.
MICHAEL DUFF: I did at bottom always feel convinced that eventually 11
dimensions would have its day. I wasn't sure when and I wasn't sure how, but
I felt convinced that sooner or later 11 dimensions would be seen to be at
the heart of things.
NARRATOR: But by now the boot was on the other foot. String Theory was in
trouble. Its five different versions meant it couldn't be the all embracing
theory physics was looking for. Everything, it seemed, had been tried to
save String Theory. Well, almost everything.
MICHAEL DUFF: An astonishing announcement was made.
MICHIO KAKU: It was yet another shockwave that revolutionised the whole
landscape.
NARRATOR: In a final desperate move the string theorists tried adding one
last thing to their cherished idea. They added the very thing they had spent
a decade rubbishing: the eleventh dimension. Now something almost magical
happened to the five competing String Theories.
BURT OVRUT: The answer turned out to be - and it really was absolutely
remarkable, I mean it really is remarkable - it turns out that they were all
the same. These five String Theories turned out to be simply different
manifestations of a more fundamental theory, precisely this theory which we
had discarded back in the early 1980s.
MICHIO KAKU: In 11 dimensions looking from the mountain-top, looking down
you could see String Theory as being part of a much larger reality, reality
of the eleventh dimension.
MICHAEL DUFF: Well it was a wonderful feeling to think that all those years
spent in the eleventh dimension were not completely wasted.
NARRATOR: The two camps had been absolutely certain the other was wrong.
Now, suddenly, they realised their ideas complemented each other perfectly.
With the addition of one extra dimension String Theory made sense again, but
it had become a very different kind of theory.
BURT OVRUT: What happened to the string?
NARRATOR: The tiny invisible strings of String Theory was supposed to be the
fundamental building blocks of all the matter in the Universe, but now, with
the addition of the eleventh dimension, they changed. They stretched and
they combined. The astonishing conclusion was that all the matter in the
Universe was connected to one vast structure: a membrane. In effect our
entire Universe is a membrane. The quest to explain everything in the
Universe could begin again and at its heart would be this new theory. It was
dubbed Membrane Theory, or M Theory, but so enigmatic and profound did the
idea seem that some thought M should stand for other things.
BURT OVRUT: M Theory.
MICHAEL DUFF: Where M stands for magic, mystery or membrane.
BURT OVRUT: M theory.
PAUL STEINHARDT: Physicists get kind of dreamy-eyed when they talk about M
Theory.
BURT OVRUT: M Theory.
MICHIO KAKU: Maybe M stands for mother, the mother of all strings. Maybe
it's magic. Maybe it's the majesty, the majesty of a comprehensive theory of
the Universe.
BURT OVRUT: M Theory.
NEIL TUROK (Cambridge University): Magical mystery, madness.
BURT OVRUT: M Theory.
NARRATOR: With M Theory it seemed at last there was a theory which might
explain everything in the Universe, but before they could decide if this was
true the scientists needed to know more about this new eleventh dimension.
It quickly became clear it was a place where all the normal rules of
common-sense have been abandoned. For one thing it is both infinitely long,
but only a very small distance across.
PAUL STEINHARDT: That eleventh dimension will, at its maximum size, could be
something like a trillionth of a millimetre.
BURT OVRUT: Well this is 10 to the -20 of a millimetre. That's taking a
millimetre and dividing it by 10 with 20 zeros after it, so that's very,
very small.
NARRATOR: That means that it exists only one trillionth of a millimetre from
every point in our three-dimensional world. It's closer than your clothes to
your body and yet we can't sense it. In this mysterious space our membrane
Universe is floating. At first no one could imagine how that worked. Then
some suggested it might float like a thin rubber sheet. Others that it might
be more like a bubble which vibrated as it was blown aimlessly across
hyperspace. If all this wasn't surreal enough, it was then proposed that
there might be another membrane universe pulsating at the opposite end of
the eleventh dimension. At first this idea wasn't taken very seriously, but
eventually it would be re-examined for physics was about to ask whether our
Universe was really alone. It began with Lisa Randall.
LISA RANDALL (Harvard University): People look at rock climbing and it's of
course very physical, but you also find that you can concentrate on one
little thing. I like solving problems, I like games, I like figuring things
out.
NARRATOR: Randall had been fascinated by an apparently inexplicable
phenomenon: the weakness of gravity.
LISA RANDALL: There are various forces we see in nature. Most of them we
understand at some level and then there's gravity which seems very
different. The gravitational force is extremely weak in comparison with the
other forces. Now you might look around and say gravity doesn't seem weak,
but if you think about it you have the entire Earth pulling on you and yet
you can manage to pick things up.
NIMA ARKANI-HAMED (Harvard University): Gravity certainly does not look weak
in everyday life. It's responsible for keeping our feet on the ground and
keeping Earth spinning around the Sun and so on, but actually gravity is
incredibly weak compared to the, to the other forces. This is easy to
appreciate if you take an ordinary refrigerator magnet and stick it on top
of a metal pin. We all know this fridge magnet will actually pick that pin
up off the table, so that sort of dramatically illustrates how feeble
gravity is compared even to the magnetic force of a tiny fridge magnet.
LISA RANDALL: It turns out that there are very new ideas on how to explain
the weakness of gravity if we have extra dimensions.
NARRATOR: When M Theory emerged, Randall and her colleagues wondered if it
might provide the explanation. Could gravity be leaking from our Universe
into the empty space of the eleventh dimensions?
NIMA ARKANI-HAMED: Gravity might only appear to be weak even though it's
fundamentally just as strong as everything else because it dilutes its
strength out in all these extra dimensions that we can't see.
NARRATOR: Randall tried to calculate how gravity could leak from our
membrane Universe into empty space, but she couldn't make it work. Then she
heard the theory that there might be another membrane in the eleventh
dimension. Now she had a really strange thought. What if gravity wasn't
leaking from our Universe but to it? What if it came from that other
universe? On that membrane, or brain, gravity would be as strong as the
other forces, but by the time it reached us it would only be a faint signal.
Now when she reworked her calculations everything fitted exactly.
LISA RANDALL: If you were to imagine that there are two membranes. Say
there's one in which we sit and one in which if there's other stuff it sits
there, but not our particles, not the stuff that we're made of and not the
stuff that we see forces associated with. If we live anywhere else in the
extra dimension we would see gravity as very weak because it's mostly
spending its time near the other brain. We only see the tail end of gravity.
NARRATOR: The weakness of gravity could at last be explained, but only by
introducing the idea of a parallel universe. Randall's idea opened a
Pandora's Box. Now suddenly physicists all over the world piled into the
eleventh dimension trying to solve age-old problems and every time it seemed
the perfect explanation was another parallel universe. Everywhere they
looked it seemed they began to find more and more of them. From every corner
of the eleventh dimension parallel universes came crawling out of the
woodwork. Some took the form of three-dimensional membranes, like our own
Universe. Others were merely sheets of energy. Then there were cylindrical
and even looped membranes. Within no time at all the eleventh dimension
seemed to be jam-packed full of membranes.
MICHIO KAKU: We began to ask ourselves the question: who lives in the
eleventh dimension? We have intersecting membranes, we have membranes with
holes in them, we have membranes that look like doughnuts or have many
different kinds of doughnut holes. We're just littered with different kinds
of membranes.
MICHAEL DUFF: This eleventh dimension not only had the membrane which was
the bubble-like or sheet-like object, but it had a whole wealth of different
branes of varying dimensions, unfortunately called pea branes.
NARRATOR: Each of these membranes was a possible other universe. M Theory
had unwittingly made the idea of parallel universes respectable again.
MICHIO KAKU: In another universe the proton may be unstable, in which case
atoms would dissolve and DNA cannot form and therefore there's no
intelligent life in these universes. Perhaps it's a universe of electrons
and electricity, perhaps a universe of lightening bolts and neutrinos, but
no stable matter.
MICHAEL DUFF: The other universes are parallel to ours and may be quite
close to ours, but of which we'd never be aware. They may be completely
different with completely different laws of nature operating.
ALAN GUTH: It may not all have life, but some fraction of them will have
life and whatever that fraction is if there's an infinite number of these
universes there'll be an infinite number of universes that have living
civilisations.
MICHIO KAKU: Some of these universes may look just like ours, except perhaps
you're not there.
NARRATOR: M Theory was getting stranger and stranger, but could it really be
a theory which explained everything in our Universe? To have any chance of
that it would have to do something no other rival theory had ever been able
to do. It would have to make sense of the baffling singularity at the
beginning of the Big Bang. M Theory was about to come up with a suitably
outrageous answer and parallel universes would be at the very heart of it.
BURT OVRUT: I was a teenager, I don't remember quite when it was and I don't
remember precisely why my father and I were down in Manhattan at the
harbour. One of the great ocean liners at the time was the Michelangelo and
it was in harbour I remember on the west side of Manhattan. Must have been
near 42nd Street. It was a remarkable sight. It's an enormous ship, let's
say 150 or 200ft high, and the entire superstructure in the front of the
ship, the entire bow had been just crushed by a wave which had blown out all
of the windows in the forward bulkhead right up to the bridge. This is one
of what they call a white wave, or a rogue wave which had hit the
Michelangelo and done all this damage. What's interesting is that there are
waves somewhat similar to this which inhabit the higher dimensions and then
you can imagine if you had this huge rogue wave moving through the higher
dimension if it slams into another wave you're going to have a tremendous
cataclysmic collision.
NARRATOR: Waves had long fascinated Burt Ovrut. Now they were just about to
turn M Theory upside down. At the beginning of 2001 the received wisdom was
that the eleventh dimension was a tranquil place with membrane universes
gently floating in it, but Burt suggested a much more exciting idea.
Universes moving through the eleventh dimension like giant, turbulent waves.
BURT OVRUT: These things can move. They are not static, they're, you know,
like everything else in the world they can move around and there's not much
room for them to move in. In fact if they move they're very likely to bang
into each other. In fact they either move away from each other, or they bang
into each other, and one thing that had occurred to me very early on is what
happens if they collide?
NARRATOR: To a new generation of cosmologists like Neil Turok Burt's vision
of the eleventh dimension sounded intriguing, but he and his colleagues had
other things on their mind. They were still wrestling with the big problems
of cosmology.
NEIL TUROK: Was there a beginning? Did time continue before the Big Bang?
Where did the Universe come from?
NARRATOR: Above all, they were still trying to solve the biggest problem of
all: what caused the very start of the Big Bang, the singularity?
NEIL TUROK: Nobody has a solution for the singularity problem other than
essentially by hand starting the Universe at a certain time and saying let's
go from there and let's not worry about what happened before and that's very
unsatisfactory. This is the deepest problem in cosmology. If you can get
through the singularity you're on your way to a complete theory of the
Universe.
NARRATOR: Most cosmologists have begun to think they might never find a
solution. They'd almost given up completely, which is when Turok and his
colleagues heard Burt explain his idea properly for the first time. At a
conference in Cambridge pioneers of M Theory had been brought together to
explore its implications. Burt was the star of the show. His vision of a
violent eleventh dimension wowed the assembled physicists and caught the
attention of the cosmologists.
PAUL STEINHARDT: We heard about a vast variety of ideas. The ideas that
struck both Neil and myself most strongly were the ideas that Burt
presented.
NARRATOR: On the last day of the conference Neil Turok, Paul Steinhardt and
Burt decided to take time out. They went to see a play.
BURT OVRUT: We wanted to see the play Copenhagen which was being performed
in London at the time and the three of us took the train down to London one
evening and we had whatever it was, an hour or so on the train to sit and
talk about these ideas.
NARRATOR: On the journey they began to throw ideas around. Three physicists,
one train, and the biggest secret about our Universe: what caused the Big
Bang.
PAUL STEINHARDT: I think people get the wrong impression about scientists in
that they think in an orderly, rigid way from step 1 to step 2 to step 3.
What really happens that often you make some imaginative leap which at the
time may seem nonsensical. When you capture the field at those stages it
looks like poetry in which you are imagining without yet proving.
NEIL TUROK: Paul, Burt and me were sitting together on the train and just
free associating.
PAUL STEINHARDT: One of us, maybe it was me, began by saying oh well why
can't we make a universe out of collision and Neil sort of pitching in and
saying well, if you did that then you could create all the matter and
radiation of the Universe, so we had this conversation, one of us completing
the sentences of the other in which we kind of just, just let our
imaginations go.
BURT OVRUT: And as we went along, at least I learned more and more about how
it might be possible to have these brain collisions produce all of the
effects of the early Universe and in particular it's just easy to do with my
hands, when they collide you might have a Big Bang.
NEIL TUROK: And the Big Bang is the aftermath of some encounter between two
parallel worlds.
NARRATOR: But how could such a collision go on to cause the world we know?
The Universe we live in has vast clumps of matter we call stars and
galaxies.
BURT OVRUT: We know that things are not smooth out in the Universe. In fact
we have little clumps, we have stars, we have galaxies, we have quasars, we
have clumps of matter.
NARRATOR: Now they had to explain how the collision of two parallel
universes could go on to create these lumps of matter. Was there something
about the membranes, or branes, which could explain it?
NEIL TUROK: People tended to think of branes as being flat, perfect sheets,
geometrical plains, but I think to us it was clear that that picture could
not be correct. It cannot be perfectly flat. It has to ripple.
PAUL STEINHARDT: What would happen as these branes approach that there are
ripples in the surface of each brain and when they come together they don't
hit at exactly the same time, same place, but in fact they hit at different
points and at different times.
BURT OVRUT: We found that as the brain moves it literally ripples, so when
the collision takes place it imparts those ripples into real matter.
NARRATOR: The parallel universes move through the eleventh dimension like
waves and like any wave these would ripple. It was the ripples which went on
to cause the clumps of matter after the Big Bang. They finally had their
complete explanation of the birth of our Universe and now they could do
something even more profound. They could take the laws of physics back in
time to the moment of the Big Bang and through to the other side.
NEIL TUROK: The existence of branes before the singularity implies there was
time before the Big Bang. Time could, can be followed through the initial
singularity.
BURT OVRUT: You sort of go back and back and back until you get near the
place where the expansion would have taken place and then it just sort of
changes into another world. When the branes collide the collision of those
can be explained within M Theory, so it just simply enters the realm of
mathematics and science now rather than being a, an unknown point that
exploded.
NARRATOR: The singularity had disappeared and it had taken them just under
an hour.
PAUL STEINHARDT: Then we went to see the play.
NARRATOR: This idea is so new it's only begun to be discussed, but if it's
accepted it will mean Einstein's missing theory has finally been found. M
Theory may really be able to explain everything in the Universe, but the
victory will be bittersweet, for at the end of its long quest, science has
discovered that the Universe it's thought to explain may be nothing special.
It is nothing more than one of an infinite number of membranes, just one of
the many universes which make up the multiverse.
MICHIO KAKU: The latest understanding of the multiverse is that there could
be an infinite number of universes each with a different law of physics. Big
Bangs probably take place all the time. Our Universe co-exists with other
membranes, other universes which are also in the process of expansion. Our
Universe could be just one bubble floating in an ocean of other bubbles.
NARRATOR: But this isn't quite the end of the story. Now that the Theory of
Everything may have been found some are keen to use it. Physics is preparing
for the ultimate flight of fancy: to make a universe of its very own without
any mysteries or unanswered questions at all.
ALAN GUTH: I in fact have worked with several other people for some period
of time on the question of whether or not it's in principle possible to
create a new universe in the laboratory. Whether or not it really works we
don't know for sure. It looks like it probably would work. It's actually
safe to create a universe in your basement. It would not displace the
universe around it even though it would grow tremendously. It would actually
create its own space as it grows and in fact in a very short fraction of a
second it would splice itself off completely from our Universe and evolve as
an isolated closed universe growing to cosmic proportions without displacing
any of the territory that we currently lay claim to.
===
_________________________________________________________________
MSN Photos is the easiest way to share and print your photos:
http://photos.msn.com/support/worldwide.aspx
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 09:16:38 MST