Documentary Description
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. The 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. 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.
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