codyg1985’s Think Tank

After watching this documentary by the BBC called “Parallel Universes,” I have some questions that I felt were unanswered by the documentary.  I’m sure that in order to completely understand the theory I would need a firm grasp on the mathematics and physics that are at work here, and that would require me to change my current field of study.

The documentary discusses M-Theory, which, in a nutshell, postulates that anything that is, was, and ever will be in our universe can be reduced to a sheet, or membrane, that exists in the eleventh dimension.  This membrane is not perfectly flat, but instead it has wrinkles, valleys, and hills in it. This membrane exists a billionth of a millimeter from our grasp, yet no one can ever sense it.

Additionally, there may be an infinite amount of these thin membranes that are in the eleventh dimension that contain completely other universes.  Moreover, gravity, which in our everyday sense is actually among the feeblest of the fundamental forces, would actually be as strong as the other three forces (strong, weak, electromagnetic), but only if it originates from another membrane/universe and arrives in our universe in a dissipated state.
Each of the membranes in the eleventh dimension are not static: they all move.  Since the membranes move, one could collide with another one.  Some proponents of M-theory have gone further to say that the creation of our universe, the Big Bang, was caused by such a collision.  Farther, the clumps of matter (galaxies, quasars, etc.) that are a staple of our current universe are the result of those wrinkles, valleys, and hills that appear in each of the two membranes as they collide with one another.

Firstly, it is pretty damn hard to imagine that our entire universe, our three-dimensional space, everything can be reduced to a sheet, so it’s even harder for me to imagine how it is possible for what we see around us to be the result of a collision of two sheets floating around in some place we can’t ever see.   If the membranes are universes onto themselves, then maybe when the two membranes collided pieces of each were pulled off and that planted the seed.  Seems quite far-fetched?  Uh huh.

Secondly, what causes these membranes to move in the first place?  Assuming our laws of physics apply in the eleventh dimension (and they should or otherwise M-theory would not be very valid), some force has to be applied to cause the membranes to move.  Well, what force would that be, and where would it come from?  The twelfth dimension?  Or does the very existence of the membranes cause their movement?  Again, I don’t have a firm grasp of the physics and math behind the theory, so how would I know?

Thirdly, if our universe (membrane) was created from the collision of two other universes (membranes), then where does it all start?  What process created the first and second membrane?  Was there a beginning?  It seems incomprehensible that there isn’t a beginning of time.  Oh yeah, *our* time began when the two other membranes collided.  Time has to exist within the realm of the eleventh dimension in order for there to be motion of the membranes.  This means that there has to be a twelfth dimension (a temporal dimension).  Meaning that perhaps there had to be a beginning of that time as well.

It seems like with each new “discovery,” a little bit of information is presented that gives us a glimpse of what happened earlier and earlier, but each discovery never seems to answer the ultimate question of what started it all.  Science and physics doesn’t want to put God into the equation, but each theory doesn’t ever put a definite beginning to everything, and IMO, I don’t think any theory can really do so.  Even if one puts God into the equation, then one has to ask: where did God come from?