Date:   7/8/2006 11:32:36 AM ( 18 y ago)
Hits:   7,844
URL:   https://www.curezone.org/forums/fm.asp?i=414800

0 of 1 (0%) readers agree with this message.  Hide votes     What is this?

Parallel Universes (The Science Channel 6/13 again)
 Imagine if you could find the explanation for everything in the universe. This is the dream that has captured the most brilliant scientists since Einstein. Now they think they may have found it. The theory is breath taking, but it has an extraordinary conclusion. That the universe we live in, is not the only one.
 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 our bubbles. Everything you’re about to hear is true, at least in this universe.
 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 have long claimed that there were such places. They were, they said, full of ghosts and spirits. (golfegg: Not exactly correct, but that’s what they said) The last thing science wanted was to be associated with such superstitions, but ever since the 1920’s physicists have been trying to make since of an uncomfortable discovery. When they tried to pin point the exact location of atomic particles like electrons, they found that it was utterly impossible. They have no single location.
 Alan Guth from Massachusetts Institute of Technology said, “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 ability of being in more than one location.”
 The early explanation that 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 too, all of them slightly different. In effect, there is a parallel universe in which Napoleon won the battle of Water Loo, in another, the British empire held on to it’s American colony, in one, you were never born.
 Alan Guth said, “Essentially anything that can happen, does happen, and one of the alternatives 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.” (golfegg: Or there is a God. “Anything can happen and does happen”)
 This idea was so uncomfortable that for decades scientists dismissed it, but in time parallel universes have made a spectacular come back. 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 biggest goal in physics has long been that it could find a single elegant theory that would sum up everything in our universe. It was this dream that would lead unwittingly to the rediscovery of parallel universes. It’s a dream that has driven the work of almost every physicist.
 Michio Kaku of City University of New York said, “When I was a child of 8, my elementary school teacher came in the room and announced that a great scientist had just died, and on the evening of 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. The theory of the universe, and I wanted to be part of that quest.”
 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 1980’s. In universities across the world, new ideas in science streamed forward. 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 about to read the mind of God, and that there would soon be no big scientific problems left. One idea was the most revolutionary of all, it seemed to sure fire the theory of everything, and capture the imagination of scientists. It had all to do with strings.
 Burt Ovrut from the University of Pennsylvania said, “It has been thought since physics began that matter was made up of particles. We have changed that point of view now. We now think that matter is made up of little strings.”
 For years it had been an article of faith that all the matter in the universe was made up 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 said, “You can think of it like a violin string, or a guitar string. If you pluck it a certain way, you get a certain frequency, but if you pluck it a different way, you get more frequencies out of the string. In fact, you have different notes. Nature is made up of all the different notes that are played on these super strings.
 Michio Kaku said, “All of a sudden we realized, the universe is a symphony, and the laws of physics are harmonies of a super string.”
 String theory was so provocative and down right weird that it immediately began to sound like a theory of everything. Michio Kaku said, “It certainly did sweep us all like a 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.”
 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 have always been the special subject of the cosmologists who study 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 gigantic 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 from Princeton University said, “We have confidence in extrapolating back from the present to when the first stars and galaxies formed, when the universe was only a billion years old. We’re 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.”
 Burt Ovrut said, “Physics was now actually 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 to the minus 35 seconds after the instant of the big bang. Absolutely fantastic!”
 If everything in the universe was to be explained, then string theory and the big bang would seamlessly emerge, and compliment 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 19 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 back all the way to the beginning of the big bang, and there would be no awkward gaps. But after years of endless refinement, there was one gap that would refuse to disappear, the most important one of all.
 Burt Ovrut said, “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 really allow us to predict what the conditions are immediately after this bang.”
 Michio Kaku said, “The fundamental problem of cosmology is that the laws of physics as we know them break down at the instant of the big bang. Some people say, well 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 center piece of the universe itself, a missing piece beyond physical law.”
 The very beginning of the big bang was the single biggest mystery of all cosmology. It was called the singularity.
 Paul Steinhardt said, “When you extrapolate Einstein’s theory of general relativity back to the beginning, you discover what we call a singularity, a cosmic singularity, which is to say that the equations blow up.” (golfegg: the real big bang)
 But the problem with the big bang was soon over shadowed; the strings were soon 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 said, “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 with 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 theses things? Shouldn’t there only be one?”
 String theory had begun to unravel. It seemed that a theory of everything was as far away as ever.
 Michio Kaku said, “Cynics had 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 a theory of nothing.”
 But just as the scientists were just about to give up hope, a new a startling discovery was about to be made. This would inspire them to begin their quest again, and force them at last to confirm their least popular idea, parallel universes.
 When string theory fell apart, not everyone was distraught. Some people even seemed to relish the fact.
 Michael Duff from the University of Michigan said, “If string theory was this so called theory of everything, five theories seemed like an embarrassment in the britches.”
 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.
 Duff said “Physics tends to be dictated by fad and fashion. There are the guru’s who dictate the direction in which new ideas grow. (golfegg: dogma?) It was a very lonely time in many ways. When I tried to get graduate students interested, many of them would say, 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.”
 What made the experience of a super gravity guy so appalling was that their theory wasn’t so 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 knit picking. It was about the number of dimensions in the universe.
 We normally think of ourselves living in a three dimensional world. We can move in three ways, left or right, up or down, and forwards and backwards. But physics likes having extra dimensions. Einstein suggested we should include time as 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 that we could not perceive, most were microscopically small, but scientists believed they were really there. String theory had been convinced that were a total of exactly 10 dimensions.
 Burt Ovrut said, “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 just got a very clear answer. It had to be in ten dimensional space. Nine spacial dimensions, and one time.”
 Super gravity though had been convinced there had to be exactly 11 dimensions.
 Michael Duff said, “The equations of super gravity took the simplest and most elegant form when written in this 11 dimensional framework.
 Michio Kaku said, “It was a war between this 10^th dimension and the 11^th dimension. In the 10 dimensional bandwagon we had string theorists, 100’s of them working to solve all the problems of the universe from one framework. The vibrating string. And then we had this small band of outcasts, outlaws, working in the 11^th dimension.”
 While string theory was in its infancy, few took seriously the 11^th dimension, but the super gravity guys never gave up hope.
 Michael Duff said, “I did fell that eventually 11 dimensions would eventually 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.”
 But by now the boot was on the other foot, string theory was in trouble. Its five different theories 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. An astonishment announcement was about to be made. There was a shockwave that revolutionized the whole landscape. 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 11^th dimension.
 Burt Ovrut said, “Now almost something magical happened to the five competing string theories. The answer turned out to be they were all the same. These five different string theories turned out to be different manifestations of a more fundamental theory, precisely this theory we had discarded back in the 1980’s.”
 Michio Kaku said, “In the 11^th dimension from the mountain top looking down, you could see string theory as part of a much larger reality, reality of the 11^th dimension.”
 Michael Duff said, “Well it was a wonderful feeling to think that all those years spent in the 11^th dimension, were not completely wasted.”
 The two sides had been absolutely convinced the other side was wrong. (golfegg: Sounds like in here!) Now suddenly they realized their two ideas complimented each other perfectly, with the addition of one extra dimension. (golfegg: Sounds like the way it should be in here!) String theory made sense again, but it had become a very different kind of theory. Burt Ovrut said, “What happened to the string?”
 A tiny invisible string was supposed to be the fundamental building block of everything in the universe, but now with the addition of the 11^th 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 profound the idea seemed that some thought that M should stand for other things, where M stands for Magic, Mother, Mystery, Majesty, (golfegg: Sound familiar?) or membrane.
 With M Theory there seemed a last there was a theory that might explain everything in the universe. But before they could decide if it was true, the scientists needed to know more about this new 11^th dimension. It quickly became clear; it was a place where all common sense had been abandoned. For one thing it is both infinitely long, but only a very small distance across.
 Michael Duff said, “That 11^th dimension at its maximum size could be at its maximum size is like a quadrillionth of a meter.”
 Burt Ovrut said, “Well this is ten to the minus 20 of a millimeter. That’s taking a millimeter and dividing it by 10 with 20 zeros after it, so that’s very very small.”
 That means that it exists only in one trillionth of a millimeter from every point in our three dimensional world. It’s closer than our cloths to our 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.
 It began with Lisa Randall from Harvard University, says “People look at rock climbing, and it’s of course very physical, but you also find that you can concentrate on one little thing, and like solving problems, I like games, I like figuring things out.”
 Randall had been fascinated by an apparently inexplicable phenomenon, the weakness of gravity.
 She says, “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.
 Nimaarkani-Hamed from Harvard University says, “Gravity certainly doesn’t look weak in every day 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 when compared to the other forces. This is easy to appreciate if you take an ordinary refrigerator magnet (golfegg: Another post in the future) and stick it above a metal pin. We all know the magnet will pick up that pin up off the table. So that dramatically illustrates how feeble gravity is compared even to the magnetic force of a tiny refrigerator magnet.”
 Randall says, “It turns out there are very new ideas on how to explain the weakness of gravity if we have extra dimensions.”
 When M theory emerged, Randall and her associates wondered if it might provide the explanation. Could gravity be leaking from our universe into the empty space of the 11^th dimension.
 Nimaarkani-Hamed says, “Gravity might only appear to be weak even though it’s fundamentally just as strong as anything else. Because it dilutes its strength out in all these extra dimensions we can’t see.”
 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 11^th dimension. Now she had a really strange thought. What if gravity weren’t leaking from our universe but to it? What if it came from that other universe? On that membrane or brane (golfegg: 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.
 Randall said, “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 we’re made of, (golfegg: not made of atoms) and not the stuff we see forces associated with. If we lived any where else in the extra dimension, we would see gravity as very weak, because it’s spending its time near the other brane. We only see the tail end of gravity.”
 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 pilled into the 11^th dimension, trying to solve age old problems, and every time it seemed a perfect explanation was another parallel universe. Every where they looked, they seemed to find more and more of them from every corner in the 11^th dimension; parallel universes came crawling out of the wood work.
 Some took the form of three dimensional membranes like our own universe. Others were merely sheets of energy, and then there were cylindrical and even looped membranes. Within no time at all, the 11^th dimension seemed to be jam packed, full of membranes.
 Michio Kaku said, “We began to ask ourselves, who lives in the 11^th dimension? We have intersecting membranes, we have membranes with holes in them, we have membranes that look like donuts, or have many different kinds of donut holes, we’re just littered with many different kinds of membranes.”
 Alan Guth said, “This 11^th dimension not only had the membrane that was the bubble like, or a sheet like object, but it had a whole wealth of branes of varying dimensions, fortunately called pea brains.”
 Each of these membranes was a possible other universe. M theory had unwittingly made the idea of parallel universes respectable again.
 Michio Kaku said, “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 neutrino’s, but no stable matter.
Alan Guth said, “The other universes are parallel to ours, and may be quit close to ours, but of which we’d never be aware. They MAY be completely different, with completely different laws of nature operating.
 Burt Ovrut said, “They MAY not all have life, but some fraction of it will have life, and what ever that fraction of it is, if there’s a infinite number of these universes, there will be a infinite number of these universes with civilizations.”
 Michio Kaku said, “Some of these universes may look just like ours, except perhaps you’re not there. “
 M theory was getting stranger and stranger, but could it really be what explains everything in our universe? To have any chance of that it would have to do something no other rival theory had been able to do. It would have to make sense of the baffling singularity beginning of the big bang. M theory was about to come out with an outrageous answer, and parallel universes would be at the very heart of it. (Commercial, imagine the Jeopardy theme)
 Now they were just about ready to turn M theory upside down. At the beginning of 2001, the perceived wisdom was that the 11^th dimension was a tranquil place with membrane universes gently floating in it. But Burt Ovrut suggested a much more exciting idea. Universes moving through the 11^th dimension like giant turbulent waves. He says, “These things can MOVE, they are not static like everything else in our world, they can move around, and there’s not much room for them to move in. In fact if they move they are very likely to bang into each other. In fact they either move away from each other, or they bang into each other. One thing that occurred to me very early on is what happens if they collide?”
 To a new generation of cosmologists like Neal Turok of Cambridge University, Burt’s vision of the 11^th dimension sounded intriguing, but he and is associates had other things on their minds. They were still wrestling with the big problems of cosmology.
 Neal Turok said, “Was there a beginning, and was there time before the big bang and where did the universe come from?”
 Above all, they were still trying to solve the biggest problem of all, what caused the start of the big bang, the singularity.
 Neal Turok said, “Nobody has a solution for the singularity problem, other than essentially by hand starting the universe at a certain time and saying lets 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.”
 Most cosmologists have begun to think they might never find the solution. They’d almost given up completely. Then Turok and his associates heard Burt explain his idea properly for the first time.  
 Paul Steinhardt said, “We heard about a vast number of ideas, the ideas that struck both Neal and myself most strongly were the ideas that Burt had presented.”
 On the last day of a conference in England Neal Turok, Paul Steinhardt, and Burt decided to take time out. They went to see a play. Burt says, “We wanted to see the play Copenhagen that was being performed in London at the time, and we took the train down to London that evening, and we had an hour or so on the train to sit and talk about these ideas.”
 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 said, “I think people get the wrong impression about scientists, that they think in a rigid way from step one to step two to step three. What really happens is you often make an imaginative leap, which at the time may seem nonsensical. You come up with an idea that you imagine, without yet proving.
 We were on the train kind of imagining well why can’t we make a universe by collision, and Neil sort of pitching in and saying, Well if we did that then you could create all the matter and radiation in the universe. So we had this conversation with one of us completing the sentences of the other, in which we kind of just let our imaginations go.”
 Then Burt said, “And as we went along, at least I learned more and more about how it might be possible to have these brane collisions produce all of the effects of the early universe, and in particular, it’s just as easy to do as to clap my hands and make a big bang.”
 Then Neal said, “And the big bang is the aftermath of some encounter between two parallel worlds.”
 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 then says, “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, and we have clumps of matter.”
 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 membrane or branes that could explain it?
 Neal said, “People tended to think of branes as flat perfect sheets, geometrical planes, 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 said, “What would happen is as these branes approached, there are ripples on the surface of each brane and that when they come together, they don’t hit the whole surface all at once, at the same time and at the same place, but in fact they hit at different points and at different times.
 Burt then says, “We found that as the brane moves it literally ripples, so when the collision takes place, it imparts those ripples (golfegg: kind of like ripples on water) into real matter.”
 The parallel universes move through the 11^th dimension like waves and like any wave, these would ripple. It was the ripples that 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.
 Neal said, “The existence of branes before the singularity implies there was time before the big bang. Time can be followed through the initial singularity.”
 Burt says, “You sort of go back and back and back until you get near to where the expansion would have taken place, and then it just sort of just 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 (golfegg: notice it leaves our realm?) now, rather than being an unknown point exploded.”
 The singularity had disappeared, and it had taken them just under an hour. This idea is so new it’s only just 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 bitter sweet. For at the end of its long quest, science has discovered that the universe it sought it explain, may be nothing special. It is nothing more than one of an infinite number of membranes, or branes. Just one of the many universes that make up the MULTIVERSE. (golfegg: another post on this coming)
 Michio Kaku said, “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. (golfegg: Bangs that we are unable to detect) Our universe co-exists with other branes, other universes that are also in the process of expansion. Our universe could be just one bubble floating in an ocean of other bubbles.”
 But this isn’t quit the end of the story. Now that the theory of everything has been found, (golfegg: So they think) 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.
One of the guys previously named said, “In fact I have worked with several other people for some period of time, on the question of weather or not if it’s in principle, possible to create a new universe in a laboratory. Weather or not it really works, we don’t know for sure. It looks like it probably would work. It’s actually safe creating 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, and without displacing any of the universe we currently lay claim to.”