M theory

gibbo

I watched a documentary a few days ago on M theory... It suggests that our universe is in a membrane and around us and are infinite amount of other membranes, containing parallel universes. And it explains that the big bang was caused by two of these other universes colliding... I'm still fairly new on the subject but its damn interesting.
LINK to documentry

newolder

gibbo,

Hmmm, that link caused this machine to fall over (again) - it's probably not video.google's error. I'll try again later. Meanwhile, have you met "Magic, Mystery, and Matrix" by Edward Witten*? It's a fine read and should bring you (or anyone) up to speed... Cheers. ed. Cool

* http://www.sns.ias.edu/~witten/papers/mmm.pdf

DoctorBeaver

Ed Witten, the discoverer of M-theory, is a brilliant man. He realised that 10-dimensional string theory and 11-dimensional supergravity are the same thing. The main problem with M-theory is that not many people can understand it (I sure as hell can't!).

The branes you talk about are areas of a higher-dimensional space called the bulk. For instance, you can have 2 4-dimensional branes (3 spatial dimensions plus 1 temporal) separated by a 4th spatial dimension that is not perceivable from the branes except by the traces that higher-dimensional particles may leave.

There is a theory (called RS1 after its creators Randall and Sundrum) that says there may be what they call a Gravity brane and a Weak brane separated by an infinite, warped 5th dimension. In that theory, there may be higher-dimensional particles called Kaluza-Klein modes. It is possible that the new LHC (Large Hadron Collider) at CERNE may find some trace of some of these particles.