When the multiverse and many-worlds collide - physics-math - 01 June 2011 Read full article Continue reading page |1|2 Editorial: "God deserves a cosmological explanation" TWO of the strangest ideas in modern physics - that the cosmos constantly splits into parallel universes in which every conceivable outcome of every event happens, and the notion that our universe is part of a larger multiverse - have been unified into a single theory. The problem is the observability of our universe. Cosmologists reconcile this seeming contradiction by assuming that the superposition eventually "collapses" to a single state. In an attempt to find a more satisfying way to explain the universe's observability, Bousso, together with Leonard Susskind at Stanford University in California, turned to the work of physicists who have puzzled over the same problem but on a much smaller scale: why tiny objects such as electrons and photons exist in a superposition of states but larger objects like footballs and planets apparently do not. Physicists call this process "decoherence".
Imagining the Fourth Dimension A direct link to the above video is at Here's where we start getting into some possible confusion because the same word can have many different meanings. When people say that "time" is the fourth dimension, what does that mean? The fourth dimension adds a way for the third dimension to change: this is obvious when we say "the third dimension is space without time". But the entropy-driven "arrow of time" that people associate with this concept is obviously not spatial, because it behaves in ways that are different from the first three dimensions. But the more we learn about "space-time" and general relativity, the more we realize that time is not just an arrow. This is why, with this project, I prefer to call the fourth dimension duration. Here's something important to remember: none of these dimensions exist in isolation. So. In "Aren't There Really 11 Dimensions?" What's outside that largest possible 4D point we've just imagined?
Imagining the Tenth Dimension