M Theory and the multiverse

Philosophy Forums Science, Technology, and Math
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Has anyone here heard of M theory? This is the new cutting edge theory that adequately explains our whole universe all in one theory. It is really a combination of super gravity theory, string theory, and paralell universe theories that has even come to explain the big bang itself. It says that there are 11 dimensions. The eleventh dimension is a membrane that is ten trillionths of a centimeter wide, and is about that same distance apart from every other dimension in the universe (or in this case the multiverse). Also contained within this 11th dimension are an infinate number of paralell universes. From this eleventh dimension leaks gravitational force, releasing small amounts of graviton into our universe. Not enough to be incredibly powerful, but enough to provide the relatively weak gravitational force which we experience through daily life. It explains the big bang by theorizing that the big bang was a result of two universal dimensions colliding, and thereby exploding into other dimensions of space and time which created our universe. Scientists are now beginning to similate the big bang in laboratories. They say it is perfectly safe because all the energy caused by a big bang spills into entirely other dimensions then our own, and creates a new universe. They can explain the clumpiness of our universe by noting that the eleventh dimensional membrane is uneven, and therefore when two uneven dimensional planes met, it created an uneven explosion.

I just saw all this on the science channel. It is a quite new theory, and there aren’t really any good websites about it up that I could find. It is fascinating though, and fits in quite well with my beliefs about the multiverse.

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Damn! No one likes physics here!

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I’ve seen a special on String-Theory on PBS, but that was about a year ago. I didn’t retain much, as my knowledge of physics is next to nothing. This M theory is definately a very interesting theory, but I’m not sure what I’d do with it if it was found to be fact. I’m having enough trouble figuring out why I work the way I work. I’m looking at the microcosm first, then hopefully it’ll give me a glimpse at the macrocosm.

Thanks ACB; Cool post!

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I already joined a few topics about this subject. And it sounds cool to me :slight_smile: .

ilovephilosophy.com/phpbb/viewto … highlight=
ilovephilosophy.com/phpbb/viewto … highlight=

In fact, here is where inventions can take place :smiley: !

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I also caught this on the Science channel. Quite interesting how they are close to similating the big bang in labs and there for creating a universe. Some how it puts everything in perspective.

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I also have heard about that theory! In fact there are some scientists that says the M theory is the same as the theory of unification ( where scientists try to unify the relativitie of Einstein and the quantum theory )!

I may be mistaked, but i think that at moment it´s not 11, but 22 dimensions that may exist!!
Like i said, im not entirely sure about this! I have read somewhere that everytime scientists investigate more about this matter there is a tendency to “found” more and more dimensions! Who knows where this will finish?!

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It is the unification of relativity and quantum theory. :wink:

You are mistaken, the theory comprehends 11 dimensions.

Go watch Brian Greene’s ‘The Elegant Universe’ series on PBS or read his two books, first one by the same name as the series and the second called ‘The Fabric of Cosmos’.

Here’s a link to streaming of the series:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/elegant/program.html

And easy on the exclamation marks. :slight_smile:

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i love string theory and the things it says and i use what brian greene says to make some of my own theories.

believing the craziness is something else.

its just a bunch of unsubstantiated math. unsubstantiatable. if a proton were the size of the solar system (maybe its the universe) then the string inside of its quarks is the size of a tree. i think the string is that small because thats how small we cant see yet.

how hard can it be to assume that there is a crazy machine that we can never see, into which we can insert all kinds of parameters. the loop of string vibrates inside a 6 or 7 dimensional space, “its uneven”, whatever they want to say, they can prove it with some pretty math, but same with that numerology number-worshipping religion whatever it is.

that said, string theory is really great.

m-theory fixes some problem string theory had where some parameter in the machine would give increasingly infinite outputs for increasingly reasonably high inputs. something like that. Ed Witten fixed the problem through some crazy desperate sounding coincidence. according to the end of ‘the elegant universe’ this 1995 discovery opened lots of some kind of doors that i havent heard about, but were apparently exciting.

the things that string theory explains that have never been explained include:
if you imagine the electron to be a basketball, and it of course is a negatively charged basketball, the side of the ball your right hand is touching is pushing on that of your left hand with the electromagnetic force, since they are both negative and really close to eachother

so either we try and describe a universe with ‘infinitely small’ constituents, which is hard since we dont know what that means.
or it could be a rubber band oscillating to a certain frequency. one side of the rubber band pushes the other, so it moves that way, then the other pushes back and they both move that way.

It would look like a rotating starfish, a 7 dimensional starfish thats the size of a tree in a proton solar system.

it also explains near-light-speed time dilation. unfortunately, this is the only thing in the whole world i dont understand yet. i think it has something to do with the string not entering your field of view all at once.

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i think when it says there is a 5th dimension, i dont think it means parallel universes. its really talking more about geometry, as in there are more than 3 directions you can go in this here universe.

the easy way to imagine this possibility is to imagine flatland, or the surface of a planet. imagine we are all 2 dimensional and stuck to the surface. what we would see in front of us when we walk around and do stuff would be a one dimensional line (roughly?), sections of which change color and get bigger or smaller depending on distance. so you know there are two dimensions, but not that you can jump up off the surface of the earth if you had 3.
short version-if you go in a straight line on the surface of the earth or our universe, youll end up where you started

then theres the small ones which remain undetected by us because they are the size of a tree in a proton solar system. like a hose filled with one dimensional worms who see by shooting a ball back and forth and counting how long it takes, anything smaller than the basic unit of observable material, the ball, can go up, down, left, right inside that hose even though the worms didnt know such words existed, to them, distance was their only dimension.

theres nothing really in string theory about this but it got me thinking about the similarities between black holes and ‘the’ big bang.

the elegant universe did actually talk about the similarity between black holes and elementary particles. both are measured by their weight and charge only i think thats what it is, they have the same, very few identifying characteristics. no surface features or texture something like that. they are a crazy tiny piece of matter, just like strings

basically: whats in that small area called the plank length? maybe when black holes drop all that matter in there it forms a big bang for a new universe bubbling out into some or all of those 7 wrapped up tiny dimensions string theory talks about.

the book describes our big bang as the strings ripping out from only 4 out of 11 possible dimensions, well what did they just rip out from? a really huge universe with a black hole the size of our universe. so then what happens when matter from a nearby star falls into it.

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If another 3-dimensonal universe shared only 2 of our dimensions I reckon it would be invisible, since it would be infinitely thin. There is, therefore, room for 9 3-dimensional universes in the complete universe of string theory. This means we would only be able to see, and possibly only be able to detect, 11.111 per cent of the universe.

By a very happy co-incidence astro physicists have decided that about 90 per cent of the universe is missing. I think those very clever string theorists may have found it.

I wonder if those other 8 universes know we’re here. I wonder if they are playing games with us. I wonder if we call what we detect if this God

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well what if the universe itself was two dimensional. what we humans see is a two dimensional representation of a three dimensional world. its hard for us to imagine what a one dimensional representation of a two dimensional world would be like because yes it would be infintely small in one of our dimensions, like left and right for example.

but those flatguys should be able to receive photons roughly like we can, they just never move to the left or right. they see objects move up and down, and they see them get smaller as they move away.

it just happens to be entirely different than we can imagine, but disregarding the fact that as steven hawking says, a two dimensional creature would have to shit out of his mouth, if we could put a probe in there, it ought to be able to receive information, just not as much

yeah that was pointless sorry

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I purposely left out 1, 2, 4 and other dimensional universes as totally beyond our comprehension.

But what if our minds exist across more than three dimensions and our brain is just the instrument for connecting our minds to our bodies. this could explain why, maybe, 50 per cent of scientific advances over the centuries have come either in dreams or ‘out of the blue’.

It could also explain why some think they have ‘somebody looking after me’, some have ‘communicated with God’, some have ‘regressed to other lives’ under hypnosis etc. Maybe it is just their own ‘Higher Self’ managing to get a word in.

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that reminds me of an interesting way to describe dreams

when we are dreaming we go to another dimension and it all makes good sense while we are there. the problem is our memory is stored in the 3rd dimension, so when we try to remember it, it comes out as a crazy jumble

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I’m glad to see there are other people out there who have not dedicated their lives to the study of physics, but who are interested in making some kind of sense of all this new science. Kudos to all of you.

It’s never ceased to amaze me how people can go through life never even wondering what’s out there or trying to extrapolate our place in the cosmos (or in fact even what the cosmos is). I call them sheeple.

I wish I were smarter so that imagining an 11 dimensional universe didn’t make my brain smoke.
Somehow the corelation between anything more than 4 dimensions and my visualization of the world breaks down.

Can anyone explain to me (in lay terms) how to visualize the 5th-11th dimensions so when I try to explain all these theories to people after watching something like this show on m theory, I don’t sound like the village idiot? All I have been able to gather is that they are ‘very small’, but somehow that doesn’t add up in my mind. I guess I should have studied quantum physics a bit more in college, but I digress.

I’m not bad at math, but I never took it to the level that these theorists are.

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[quote=“JimboUnderground”]
I wish I were smarter so that imagining an 11 dimensional universe didn’t make my brain smoke.

Very nicely put. Have you ever seen an infra-red camera showing something up in the dark? Our ancestors would have thought it magic and that we were gods. But it’s all a question of how to look, where to look and knowing there’s something to look for.

If the answer was in any way easy then somebody would have found it years ago. If anything does exist beyond our present comprehension it must seem completely outrageous, at first view, or we would have at least theorised it’s presence already.

I’m delighted that science has at last found the first traces of a possibility. Incidentally, just because we can’t see ‘it’ doesn’t mean ‘it’ can’t see us. Why doesn’t ‘it’ stop buggering around and make it’s presence known? I hear you say. I’ve just watched the television news; would you bother?

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where have you all been hanging??? finding “other people out there who have not dedicated their lives to the study of physics, but who are interested in making some kind of sense of all this new science” is absolutely the go! :smiley:

to help picture multiple dimensions, first consider the following description…

picture a bubble of gelatin. now picture the gelatin being plucked from the top, front and side. this ‘sets up’ three primary standing waves that, when intersecting for the first time, create a rolling x,y,z axis. all three primary directions then continue traveling, strike the other side of the bubble and reflect back, but with signal loss on tangential axis. these tangential and lesser waves begin to ‘break up’ and distort as they come into contact with other lost, tangential waves as created by the other primary waves. also, more primary plucks are entering the gelatine base such that the first primary xyz becomes the second most ‘powerful’ (less dilute/expended), then the third, fourth, etc. picture this process continuing for quite some time, until some of the tangential wavelets that are of the appropriate sympathetic velocity are ‘caught up’ in one (or more) of the rolling primary x,y,z axis. the primary axis ‘captures’ these wavelets and causes them to be warped into orbital form by virtue of their being lesser in energetic terms.

these wavelets, analogically, are at electrons. unsympathetic wavelets, be they too fast or two slow (neutrinos, etc) are not trapped by the primary waves. the electron then begins to create a ‘circular wake’ (string) in the primary wave that it can follow/be guided by as it completes it’s circuit. this action happens at a rate so fast that it partially ‘traps’ primary wave energy within it’s orbital path. this trapped primary energy is nucleonic energy. the proton is the wake, the ‘tail’ of the electron.

the point of that is that right now, as you live and read, super-massive lines of force are creating your 3d-dom. they are passing thru you and everything else you know as real. the x,y,z that you know as here and now is rolling along like an ocean wave, and you are made of bubbles that are rolling sympathetically along with it. and all of that is merely energy moving thru a ‘mass’ of what must be the mother of all superconductors. think sound waves traveling thru rock. so, in summary, the sympathetic energies that are your electrons are rolling along, being held in orbit by the super-massive primary waves (along with all material existence) and we’re passing thru an inert ‘substance’ (the gelatine). our dimensions are dictated by the travel of the captured wavelet’s available, stable trajectories. this actually puts us and our existence as ‘angular’ to the primary xyz’s that shape our relatively sparsely energised universe.

how does that sit with the interested parties here ‘bouts?

beans