Horizon - Parallel Universes.avi

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DESCRIPTION: Education thru Information http://conspiracycentral.net:6969 http://conspiracycentral.info (Educational & Conspiracy Forum In TV & Radio follow-up: TV programmes Animal Hospital Big Cat Diary Bill Oddie Goes Wild Britain Goes Wild British Isles: A Natural History Countryfile Cousins Dangerous Passions Dragons Alive Geronimo Hawking Horizon Jungle Leonardo Life on Air Nile Should I Worry About...? Robots State of the Planet Talking with Animals Test Your Pet What Am I Like? Wild Africa Wild Down Under TV & radio listings Presenters Contact Us Like this page? Send it to a friend! You are here: BBC > Science & Nature > TV & Radio Follow-up > Horizon Parallel Universes BBC Two 9.00pm Thursday 14 February 2002 Imagine a universe co-existing in parallel with ours Click for programme summary Jump to the Science message board Back to homepage BBC Science's Space site has more on this Horizon story Transcript NARRATOR (DILLY BARLOW): Imagine you could find an explanation for everything in the Universe, from the smallest events possible to the biggest. This is the dream which has captivated the most brilliant scientists since Einstein. Now they think they may have found it. The theory is breathtaking and it has an extraordinary conclusion: that the Universe we live in is not the only one. MICHIO KAKU (City University of New York): That 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 other bubbles. NARRATOR: Everything you are about to hear is true, at least in this Universe it is. 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 had long claimed there were such places. They were, they said, full of ghosts and spirits. The last thing science wanted was to be associated with such superstition, but ever since the 1920s physicists have been trying to make sense of an uncomfortable discovery. When they tried to pinpoint the exact location of atomic particles like electrons they found it was utterly impossible. They had no single location. ALAN GUTH (Massachusetts Institute of Technology): 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 possibility of, in some sense, being in more than one place at one time. NARRATOR: The only explanation which 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, all of them slightly different. In effect, there's a parallel universe in which Napoleon won the Battle of Waterloo. In another the British Empire held on to its American colony. In one you were never born. ALAN GUTH: Essentially anything that can happen does happen in one of the alternatives which 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. NARRATOR: This idea was so uncomfortable that for decades scientists dismissed it, but in time parallel universes would make a spectacular comeback. 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 most fervent wish of physics has long been that it could find a single elegant theory which would sum up everything in our Universe. It was this dream which would lead unwittingly to the rediscovery of parallel universes. It's a dream which has driven the work of almost every physicist. MICHIO KAKU: On the ice rink I am communing with the fundamental laws of physics. At the instant of creation we believe that the Universe was symmetrical, it was pure, it was elegant. Without friction Newtonian laws are laid bare, simple, elegant and beautiful, pure, noble, elemental, just like it was at the beginning of time. When I was a child of eight my elementary school teacher came in the room and announced that a great scientist had just died and on the evening news 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, a theory of the Universe and I wanted to be part of that quest. NARRATOR: 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 1980s. In universities across the world new ideas in science streamed forth. 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 ready to read the mind of God. There would soon be no big scientific problems left. One idea was the most revolutionary of all. It seemed a sure fire Theory of Everything and captured the imagination of scientists like Burt Ovrut. It was all to do with string. BURT OVRUT (University of Pennsylvania): It has been thought since physics began that matter was made up of particles. We had changed that point of view now. We now think that matter is made up of little strings. NARRATOR: For years it had been an article of faith that all the matter in the Universe was made 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: You can think of it as a violin string or a guitar string. If you pluck it in a certain way you get a certain frequency, but if you pluck it a different way you can get more frequencies on this string and in fact you have different notes. Nature is made of all the little notes, the musical notes, that are played on these super-strings. MICHIO KAKU: All of a sudden we realised the Universe is a symphony and the laws of physics are harmonies of a super-string. NARRATOR: String Theory was so provocative and downright weird that it immediately began to sound like a perfect Theory of Everything. BURT OVRUT: It certainly did sweep us all by 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. NARRATOR: 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 had always been the special subject of the cosmologists who studied 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 giant 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 (Princeton University): We have confidence in extrapolating back from the present to when the first stars and galaxies formed and the Universe was only a billion years old, or 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. ALAN GUTH: Physics was now actually ready to talk about these bizarre sounding events in the Universe, fractions of a second and even billionths and billionths and billionths of a second, 10-35 seconds after the instant of the Big Bang. Absolutely fantastic. NARRATOR: If everything in the Universe was to be explained then String Theory and the Big Bang would now seamlessly merge and they'd complement 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 10 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 their way back all the way to the beginning of the Big Bang. There would be no awkward gaps, but after years of end-less refinement there was one gap which refused to disappear, the most important one of all. ALAN GUTH: 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 even describe, doesn't really allow us to predict what the conditions are immediately after this bang. MICHIO KAKU: The fundamental problem of cosmology is that the laws of physics as we know them break down at the instant of the Big Bang. Well some people say 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 centrepiece of the Universe itself, a missing piece beyond physical law. NARRATOR: The very beginning of the Big Bang was the single biggest mystery in all of cosmology. It was called the singularity. PAUL STEINHARDT: When you extrapolate Einstein's general Theory of Relativity back to the beginning you discover what we call a singularity, a cosmic singularity, which is to say that the equations blow up. NARRATOR: But the problem with the Big Bang was soon overshadowed. The strings were 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: 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, was 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 these things, shouldn't there only be one? NARRATOR: String Theory had begun to unravel. It seemed as if the dream of a Theory of Everything was as far away as ever. MICHIO KAKU: Cynics 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 the theory of nothing. NARRATOR: But just as the scientists were about to give up hope, a new and startling discovery would be made. This would inspire them to begin their quest again and force them at last to confront their least popular ides: parallel universes. When String Theory fell apart, not everyone was distraught. Some people even seemed to relish the fact. MICHAEL DUFF (University of Michigan): If String Theory really was this so-called Theory of Everything five theories of everything seems like an embarrassment of riches. NARRATOR: 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. MICHAEL DUFF: Physics tend to be dictated by fad and fashion. There are the gurus who dictate the direction in which new ideas grow. It was a very lonely time in many ways. When I tried to get graduate students interested many of them would say well 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. NARRATOR: What made the experience of the super gravity guys so galling was that their theory wasn't so very 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 nitpicking. It was about the number of dimensions in the Universe. We normally think of ourselves as living in a three-dimensional world. We can move in three ways: left or right, up or down, and forwards and backwards, but physics liked adding extra dimensions. Einstein suggested time should be 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 which we could never perceive. Most were microscopically small, but scientists believed they were really there. String Theory had been convinced there were in total exactly 10 dimensions. BURT OVRUT: 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, it just got a very clear answer. It had to be in 10 dimensional space. MICHIO KAKU: Ten dimensions. BURT OVRUT: Nine spatial dimensions and one time. NARRATOR: Super gravity though had been convinced there were exactly eleven dimensions. MICHAEL DUFF: The equations of super gravity took their simplest and most elegant form when written in this 11 dimensional framework. MICHIO KAKU: There was a war between the tenth dimension and the eleventh dimension. In the 10-dimensional bandwagon we had string theorists, hundreds of them, working to tease out all the properties of the known universe from one framework: a vibrating string and then we had this small band of outcasts, outlaws, working in the eleventh dimension. NARRATOR: While String Theory was in its ascendancy, few took seriously the eleventh dimension, but the super gravity guys never gave up hope. MICHAEL DUFF: I did at bottom always feel convinced that eventually 11 dimensions would 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. NARRATOR: But by now the boot was on the other foot. String Theory was in trouble. Its five different versions 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. MICHAEL DUFF: An astonishing announcement was made. MICHIO KAKU: It was yet another shockwave that revolutionised the whole landscape. NARRATOR: 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 eleventh dimension. Now something almost magical happened to the five competing String Theories. BURT OVRUT: The answer turned out to be - and it really was absolutely remarkable, I mean it really is remarkable - it turns out that they were all the same. These five String Theories turned out to be simply different manifestations of a more fundamental theory, precisely this theory which we had discarded back in the early 1980s. MICHIO KAKU: In 11 dimensions looking from the mountain-top, looking down you could see String Theory as being part of a much larger reality, reality of the eleventh dimension. MICHAEL DUFF: Well it was a wonderful feeling to think that all those years spent in the eleventh dimension were not completely wasted. NARRATOR: The two camps had been absolutely certain the other was wrong. Now, suddenly, they realised their ideas complemented each other perfectly. With the addition of one extra dimension String Theory made sense again, but it had become a very different kind of theory. BURT OVRUT: What happened to the string? NARRATOR: The tiny invisible strings of String Theory was supposed to be the fundamental building blocks of all the matter in the Universe, but now, with the addition of the eleventh 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 enigmatic and profound did the idea seem that some thought M should stand for other things. BURT OVRUT: M Theory. MICHAEL DUFF: Where M stands for magic, mystery or membrane. BURT OVRUT: M theory. PAUL STEINHARDT: Physicists get kind of dreamy-eyed when they talk about M Theory. BURT OVRUT: M Theory. MICHIO KAKU: Maybe M stands for mother, the mother of all strings. Maybe it's magic. Maybe it's the majesty, the majesty of a comprehensive theory of the Universe. BURT OVRUT: M Theory. NEIL TUROK (Cambridge University): Magical mystery, madness. BURT OVRUT: M Theory. NARRATOR: With M Theory it seemed at last there was a theory which might explain everything in the Universe, but before they could decide if this was true the scientists needed to know more about this new eleventh dimension. It quickly became clear it was a place where all the normal rules of common-sense have been abandoned. For one thing it is both infinitely long, but only a very small distance across. PAUL STEINHARDT: That eleventh dimension will, at its maximum size, could be something like a trillionth of a millimetre. BURT OVRUT: Well this is 10 to the -20 of a millimetre. That's taking a millimetre and dividing it by 10 with 20 zeros after it, so that's very, very small. - Come visit us at www.TorrentBox.com
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