Word: cosmos
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...FABRIC OF THE COSMOS By Brian Greene Quick, how many dimensions does space-time have? Answer: 11. Does time really flow forward? Nope. Is teleportation possible? Yep. Greene, a superstring expert who teaches physics and math at Columbia University, uses The Simpsons characters to illustrate the ground rules of a universe that is so much weirder than you thought. Result? Science that's as much fun as science fiction...
...fabric of space-time and send a brand-new universe expanding in a direction undetectable and imperceptible to us. Since giant black holes lurk at the cores of many billions of galaxies and smaller holes are left behind by many billions of individual exploding stars, that could mean our cosmos has given birth to a staggering number of baby universes. And each of those could give birth in turn to billions more...
...leads once again to multiple universes. The inflationary period in our own region of space ran out of steam early on, but theorists, including Stanford University's Andrei Linde and Tufts University's Alexander Vilenkin, have shown that it should continue in others. Our own part of the cosmos took a sort of off ramp to evolve into the universe we see today, but the rest kept going, at breakneck speed--and that part is still going, spawning universes along the way, beyond our comprehension. In some, says Linde, the laws of physics could easily be so different that...
...theorist at the University of Pennsylvania: "People have tried very hard to get rid of these multiple universes and failed. They just don't like the concept; they think it's weird. And they're right. But don't we already have good evidence by now that the cosmos really is weird?" To Einstein's celebrated musing about whether God had a choice in creating the universe, the answer seems to be a resounding yes: all sorts of universes are possible...
...result of pure chance. The elliptical shapes of planetary orbits, on the other hand, led to the truly profound discovery of Newton's laws of gravity. "My own feeling," says Brian Greene, a superstring theorist at Columbia University and author of the best-selling The Fabric of the Cosmos, "is that we can give a deeper explanation of why this universe, with its particular properties, came...