M-theory

From the string theories and the supergravity theory farrowed the idea of membranes and the need of parallel universes to satisfy mathematical equations, that physicists from all over started to embrace a few years ago, despite long trashing it, out of what'd possibly be fad- and fashion-prescribed directions to attempts of understanding the universe and everything in it.

I don't know if one can see the irony in the whole turnaround but haven't we learned if nothing at all that we are in a very primitive stage of being able to quantify everything. An open mind to less-than-main-stream ideas at least? Science isn't a religion and some guys can do without their almost evangelical following.

Horizon's documentary Parallel Universes originally aired in 2002 does an effective job connecting the basics and central ideas of how the nonsensical transformed into the likely. In a nutshell what perhaps is the most exciting yet frustrating lies within its explanation of the big bang.

Everything you're about to read here seems impossible and insane, beyond science fiction. Yet it's all true.

Scientists now believe there may really be a parallel universe - in fact, there may be an infinite number of parallel universes, and we just happen to live in one of them. These other universes contain space, time and strange forms of exotic matter. Some of them may even contain you, in a slightly different form. Astonishingly, scientists believe that these parallel universes exist less than one millimetre away from us. In fact, our gravity is just a weak signal leaking out of another universe into ours.

In another universe, the British could win the American Civil WarThe same but different

For years parallel universes were a staple of the Twilight Zone. Science fiction writers loved to speculate on the possible other universes which might exist. In one, they said, Elvis Presley might still be alive or in another the British Empire might still be going strong. Serious scientists dismissed all this speculation as absurd. But now it seems the speculation wasn't absurd enough. Parallel universes really do exist and they are much stranger than even the science fiction writers dared to imagine.

Greater dimensions

It all started when superstring theory, hyperspace and dark matter made physicists realise that the three dimensions we thought described the Universe weren't enough. There are actually 11 dimensions. By the time they had finished they'd come to the conclusion that our Universe is just one bubble among an infinite number of membranous bubbles which ripple as they wobble through the eleventh dimension.

Each universe may exist as a bubble with its own laws of physics

A creative touch

Now imagine what might happen if two such bubble universes touched. Neil Turok from Cambridge, Burt Ovrut from the University of Pennsylvania and Paul Steinhardt from Princeton believe that has happened. The result? A very big bang indeed and a new universe was born - our Universe. The idea has shocked the scientific community; it turns the conventional Big Bang theory on its head. It may well be that the Big Bang wasn't really the beginning of everything after all. Time and space all existed before it. In fact Big Bangs may happen all the time.

Of course this extraordinary story about the origin of our Universe has one alarming implication. If a collision started our Universe, could it happen again? Anything is possible in this extra-dimensional cosmos. Perhaps out there in space there is another universe heading directly towards us - it may only be a matter of time before we collide.

wikipedia.org/wiki/M-theory
Parallel Universes torrent