The Universe and parallel universes...........

The Universe

I have been reading Stephen Hawkings book “Universe in a nutshell”, its an awesome book which can be read by anybody even those who don’t have a background in physics or mathematics. This book is not a sequel to his earlier book “A brief history of time”, infact Dr Hawking received a lot of letters from people saying that ‘Brief History of time’ was little to complex for an ordinary person to understand and that is why lot of people started reading the book but couldn’t reach the last chapters which were very exciting. Hence in his new book he has adopted a different pattern, after reading the first few pages of the introduction and a few basic concepts like ‘space time’, ‘anthropic principle’ you can proceed to any chapter and fully understand it. Dr Hawkings sense of humor is simply delightful, whilst explaining the most complex concepts like the cosmological constant a mathematical tool created by Einstein, Dr Hawking can come up with a superb piece of Humor. Anyways I still haven’t understood a hell lot of things, and may be I won’t be able to even in the future, but its amazing knowing about the universe, its origin and fate.

There is an interesting point which was taken up by Immanuel Kant with regards to the origin of the universe. Kant says that if the universe had a definite beginning why was there an infinite wait before the beginning? And in case the universe had existed forever which was suggested by Newton, then why hadn’t all those things happened that were supposed to happen, as in the universe should have reached a stage of thermal equilibrium and history should have been over by now. This is one of the contradictions. The second aspect which is of much recent origin is that of String theory which is stills a developing mathematical model, this theory suggests that our universe is just a part of another larger large universe and this universe contains many smaller universes like ours. It’s like a loaf of bread, in which our universe is like one slice and the other slices right next to us are the parallel universes. Every event in the universe is parallel claims this theory but the physical outcome varies. This almost sounds like something from a science fiction book, but the example which I read was that suppose you are quickly passing a signal and a car comes towards you in top speed, you quickly step aside and are relieved. But this theory suggests that somewhere in some other universe one person is hit by that car in that universe, in some other universe maybe a person even died, and maybe in some other universe the person was partially hurt. Sounds crazy I know! But this theory and claim cannot be completely dismissed say physicist from around the world. http://youtube.com/watch?v=2_vpEyE6rug this is a documentary on parallel universes by BBC, its awesome!