Tuesday - November 18, 2003
String Theory, The Big Bang, and the End of All Things
I watched a show on PBS the other day called "The
Elegant Universe" which was about string theory. String theory is still
controversial and no one can say to what degree it is accurate, or if there is
anything legitimate about it at all. But some of the ideas presented in this
television show have some disturbing implications for our long term, or even
short term future.
I had always
regarded intelligence to be the opposite of entropy. That is, the principle of
entropy requires that all things will move to a less organized state. Chemical
reactions, and even organic reactions such as photosynthesis can temporarily
organize matter and energy, but so far as we know, only intelligence has the
potential to continuously delay the onset of entropy. I had always had faith
that no matter what happens in the universe we would be able to face it with
intelligence and action, not unlike Buck Rogers, and be able to survive as a
species.
After watching this show I
can no longer have this faith. Even if we won't be capable of stopping the end
of the Big Bang, it seemed to come at a predictable time frame, measurable in
billions of years. String theory blows this out of the water.
We've all heard about the Big Bang theory which
surmises that the universe began as all matter and energy concentrated in a
single point which then exploded and dispersed all matter into the expanding
universe that we now perceive. Variations on this theme further surmise two
different scenarios, one where the universe expands infinitely, the other where
it reaches a maximum and then retracts into a point
again.
The problem with this theory is
that it can't explain the end points, nor can it explain what is beyond the
universe. I refuse to accept that there is nothing beyond the universe. It may
be true that we can't see past it or travel past it, but something is beyond it
nonetheless. The Big Bang theory doesn't address this possibility at
all.
Enter string theory and the
concept of membranes, or "branes" as they called them on the show. (I'll have
to get the book!) Essentially one new theory put forth is that we exist in 11
dimensions, though we only immediately perceive three of the spatial dimensions
and the time dimension. The dimensions that we perceive are contained in a
brane which exists in the vicinity of other branes. Imagine that our brane is a
pancake and the other branes are other pancakes in a stack. Better yet, imagine
that the branes are pieces of cellophane floating in a swimming pool. Normally,
each brane or piece of cellophane floats by itself and nothing happens, but
occasionally the pieces of cellophane will touch each other. This brane to
brane contact would be extremely violent, and the theory as presented on this
television show is that this point of contact is the origin of the Big Bang.
As pictured on this television show,
these brane-to-brane contacts are haphazard or random. No one can say if any of
this is true, but the randomness of a new Big Bang occurring is unsettling. By
this theory we could all be dead tomorrow or a hundred years, rather than in
billions of years.
I'm not about to run
around in the streets with a "The End is Near" sign, but this new world view has
shaken my confidence in man's intelligence being able to find a solution for
every problem we can face. I'd always accepted that there will be challenges to
our future eons, and we could very well fail to continue in existence, but I'd
always hoped that our intelligence could offset entropy and every other threat
to our future.
Intelligence is still
the opposite of entropy, but there is no defense from randomness of events we
can't perceive.
Ah, but I can still
hope that someday we'll understand this string theory or whatever else comes
along, and be learn how to perceive this potential threat to our existence. Who
knows, maybe if this random brane collision doesn't occur for a few billion
years, perhaps we will have figured a way to move between branes, and maybe even
control them. I guess I'm an incorrigible optimist.
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