Parallel Worlds

February 26, 2008 by gbrown 

Since my dad first “borrowed” his university’s refractor telescope and we spent one Summer afternoon observing sunspots I’ve been incredibly fascinated by what lies “out there”.

The night sky is possibly one of the most elegant manifestations of nature. Stare through a telescope at Saturn and its moons and you glimpse a reality millions of miles from our own, a reality that will exist both with and without us.

Last time we holidayed in Borneo I walked to the end of Sipadan island by torchlight to sit on a sandy spur and observe what was a most glorious heavenly spectacle - the darkest night sky. Anyone who has holidayed in the Mediterranean will realise why it was the Greeks, Egyptians, Romans and Arabs who paid special heed to the night sky for there it is visible in its most natural form.

When I was a child I used to be able to see clearly the milky way from my parents’ back garden in Hampshire. The Japanese call it “Amanogawa”, describing it as a river. In a truly dark sky, it is as defined as a wide snowy river snaking from one horizon to the other. Such sights are increasingly rare these days. Now there is but an orange glow of halogen streetlights and the ever present irritation of neighbour security lights.

Like the coral reefs in Sipadan first dived by Jacques Cousteau 50 years ago, nature’s treasures are disappearing from view. Our children’s view of the Universe will be the reality of what they can see on the internet rather than their naked eye.

Yet despite the apparent loss, the fascination has never left me. The sense of being totally overwhelmed by the sheer scale and beauty of the night sky and the Universe is truly liberating. It reminds me of those moments looking out of the plane window staring down on distant landscapes or twinkling lights in the sea. Suddenly I’m reminded that we are actors on a much bigger stage, and in many ways are bitparts are merely one very faint star in the sky.

I’m currently reading Michio Kaku’s “Parallel Worlds”.

On the face of it, the font reminiscent of a cheap 70s made-for-tv scifi drama combined with the ominous title and the numerous references to space travel, black holes and a 11 dimensional multiverse does not bode well.

A fantasy scifi romp across the universe favoured by teenage males in Red Dwarf t-shirts more at home in front of a linux box or in a dungeons and dragons society?

No. This is the real deal.

Parallel Worlds is a brave attempt to translate the last 100 yrs of philosophizing, experimenting and downright speculation about our Universe into a book readable by your average Joe without patronizing or dumbing down the content.

My initial interest was in Kaku’s earlier works concerning Einstein, whom I greatly admire. We’ve all heard of the theory of relativity yet few know much beyond this seminal work save something to do with light travel and often more erroneously nuclear weaponry.

Cosmology has for many years been to Physics what Parapsychology represents to the cognitive sciences I nothing more than a collection of rants by physicists who had little evidence to bear except highly dubious speculations. Yet since the advancement of satellite based telescopic imaging remarkable insights into the very nature of our Universe have been unravelled.

Michio Kaku, Physicist on String Theory


Firstly, we now have a pretty good estimate as to the actual age of the Universe - 13.7 billion years, based on detecting the residue radiation invisible to the naked eye.

Secondly, we have a good idea as to its actual dimensions and scale. As Douglas Adams flippantly wrote “space is big… Very big”. Indeed we now have pictures of galaxies that are nearly 13 billion light years away, meaning the light that is reaching us from these distant points hails from a time (relatively) close to the Universe’s birth.

Thirdly, we have a much better understanding of what space is actually made out of. Well, to be honest our hypotheses are slightly more believable. Believe it or not, the vast majority of space is composed of a “stuff” we know little about - dark matter and dark energy.

Lastly, we know that space is not uniform. As Einstein revealed in his theory of relativity - time has no absolute constant. Depending on our physical conditions (namely speed) the two of us could be experiencing time at a different rate.

Furthermore, space is often curved and warped. Kaku explains that this theory explains to some degree how gravity works, given that for many years our scientific community have been unable to explain this mysterious “wave”.

Kaku explains gravity thus: take a mattress and on it place a bowling ball. The ball is the earth and the mattress space. The heavy ball sinks into the mattress. Now take a marble which could be any space shuttle, airplane or flying object. Rolling the marble across the mattress you’ll notice the marble drawn into the bowling ball’s depression and naturally attracted to the ball. This, in a rough analogy, is not only how gravity works but how space is curved.

All very fascinating. You thought the prelude was tough? That was just a warmup to the main act - String Theory and 11 dimensional multiverses. More later…

Filed under: Out beyond our ideas
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Comments

One Response to “Parallel Worlds”

  1. Ged Carroll on February 27th, 2008 8:52 pm

    I used to go and work on the family farm in the West of Ireland during the summer months and can remember how the night sky that was so visible (though the milky way was quite hard to discern) and how light pollution from sodium vapour and mercury vapour street lamps has creeped up over the years and stolen the night sky.

    If you enjoy Parallel Worlds you may appreciate MIT’s OCW Cosmology and Astrophysics courses linked off this index page: http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/courses/courses/index.htm

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