Nothing

[contracycle]

I'm posting this in actual play for lack of anywhere else; its just a topic that might be of interest to the world-builders and scene-designers and so forth, and becuase I think its so darned interesting:

So, last night's Horizon prog in the UK covered M-theory, the current
lead contender for Grand Unified Theory of Everything. And boy is it
a doozy.

To cut to the chase, the model assumes that the universe we
experience exists within 11 dimensions, ten of which are spatial and
one of which is time. This theory has emerged out of what has become
the synthesis of superstring theory and supergarvity theory.

The universe was "called into being" when at least two "membranes",
which are kinda spatial dimensions floating in a "Nothing" (that
capitalised term was in fact used by Michio Kaku in webcast after the
prog) struck each other and merged. The membranes ripple in their
own right; the congruence and randomness of the two sets of ripples
produced the "lumpiness" of material reality as we encounter it.

Atoms, physical objects, are themselves a "ripple", or vibration, on
the surface of the 'branes. The laws of chemistry, then, are the
music played on these surfaces, a bit like a drumbeat, say. Kaku
speculates that in the next 5-10 years, if M-theory turns out to be
correct, we might be able to reverse engineer ALL the laws of physics
and chemistry from first principles. He also speculates that
wormholes may be passing into the Nothing, and that gamma ray
bursters may be a hole torn in the membrane which we inhabit,
injecting energy either from the nothing or from another 'brane -
this need research. Further, the theory suggests that matter
is "free" after all; although its beyond my ability to comprehend,
Kaku argued that gravity and matter are opposite polar expressions of
the same phenomenon, and that both are brought into existance in the
same encounter between the 'branes; any time 'branes contact like
this - and currently it is thought that the number of 'branes in the
Nothing is infinite - come into contact, matter and energy appear.
This also means that time in fact is older than the univers; with M-
theory we can push mathematically back beyond the creation of our
own universe. Some other physicists speculated that it might be
quite easy to create 'branes in the lab, and would even be safe; the
brane would not, say, displace our space-time, because it produces
its own space-time. Lastly, in the web chat Kaku mentioned that
there is a theory running about that our 11-dimensional universe
could be conceived of as a 4-dimensional bubble sitting in a sea of a
further 7 dimensions; according to the theory, not only could there
be an alternate "timespace", a second 4-dimensional bubble in the same
11D framework, but that it might have a specific position 1
millimeter away from our own. Apparently this goes to explaining
some of our problems with gravity - Kaku mentioned that "dark matter"
might be another "universe" sitting right next to ours, interacting
with us gravitationally, but in no other way, 1 mil away. Now thats
pretty freaky.

Apparently, not much of this offers serious challenge to things like
the speed of light because it is still a quantum theory. However,
I'm sure that this stuff provides lots of grist to the scifi mill; I
have to say that with all these membranes, free energy, non-space and
neighbouring universes, the opportunities for rationalising a
hyperspace drive of SOME description seem better and better.

[Mike Holmes]

Swoot!

Thanks for posting the synopsis.

Mike

[Marco]

I love this stuff. Maybe there should be a forum for "ideas." I'm working on a source book that deals with Alice in Wonderland (and various permutations thereof) and Knot theory.

-Marco

[contracycle]

that gamma ray bursters may be a hole torn in the membrane which we inhabit, injecting energy either from the nothing or from another 'brane -

This was an error.  Kaku sopeculated that gamma ray bursters, being the largest emissions of energy we know, may be tearing a hole in out 'brane from the inside.