Warning: String Theory Ahead
So, recently, for extra credit in my Modern Physics course, which covers relativity, quantum mechanics, and nuclear physics, we recieved an extra credit assignment to watch a 3 Hour PBS presentation of The Elegant Universe, a book dealing with String Theory. The link posted at the bottom of this page will lead you to the online form of this 3 hour presentation, each hour broken up into 6 or so minute blobs. I highly recommend watching it!
Anyways, watching this brought a few rhetorical questions to my mind that I'm sure aren't rhetorical, but are slightly difficult to answer.
During the presentation, there was talk about a "Brane". A Brane, in short, is a kind of 'super string'. See, in string theory, everything is made up of vibrating bands of energy called strings, that are somewhere on the order of 10^-24 times smaller than a Quark. Quark's, if you don't know, are really friggin' small particles that make up Protons and Neutrons. Anyways, the theory about these Brane's state that if a string has enough energy, it grows. Huge. Thinks about this 3-D string containing our entire UNIVERSE. The thought is then that there might be many, many Branes about. This leads to a new theory of the big bang, such that the energy that caused the creation of the universe was actually simply two Branes coliding. Bang. This theory has a ton of problems, mainly because its simple lacking even a mathimatical process to describe it. It's more of a "well, it could happen...". So, one of the biggest things String Theory tells us about The Big Bang (quite a misnomer since Bang implies sound, and sound needs matter to propogate itself, and if The Big Bang generated all matter in the universe, there couldn't have been any to propogate the sound, so its more of a "The Big Quiet") is that it wasn't the begining. It wont be the ending. The universe existed infinately long before it... which again really just tells us that looking for a "where it all began" is a failing of human logic, because not everything HAS to begin.
Anyways, one of the things brought to my attention by this program about The Big Bang was this: when it first happened, all matter was compressed to an infinately dense point. Infinately heavy mass at an infinitesimally small point... sound familiar? It's not a 'super atom'... its a black hole! A Quantum Singularity if you will... a kind of Super Black Hole that had all the matter of the universe in it. Unfortunately, we still have no way of knowing what caused it to explode, so The Big Bang theory remains unstable as ever.
If you're curious about Big Bang theory Ms. Inj, this report offers some good supporting evidence, as well as debunking evidence. I think it was constructed very well, offering both sides of the problem.
Next, as I said before when talking about Branes, is that there could be multiple, lined up next to our own. These would be parallel universes for all intents and purposes. Well, if you can have a parallel universe... could you also have an anti-parallel (perpendicular) universe? What about a tangent one? Parallel implies a form of geometry, and intersection is possible in all forms, Hyperbolic or Euclidean.
Just some fun stuff to muse over for the next few weeks, undoubtably to be forgotton within the matrices of my first 500 level math course this summer. Yay...
Here's a link to a 3 hour program (broken up into 6 minute chunks so its very watchable) aired by PBS about String Theory. I highly recommend watching it! It requires Real Player or Quick Time tho... boo!
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/elegant/program.html
Daniel Out.