Horizon: To infinity & beyond...

HORIZON... To infinity & Beyond is now on BBC iPlayer.

It's worth a look > they'll expalin everything I've written below...

Everything you're about to read here seems impossible and insane,

beyond science fiction. Yet it's all true.

Awesome worlds, some totally alien - and some identical copies of out own Earth, complete with us & our

own thoughts too... Scientists believe there's an infinite number of them.

Scientists now believe there may really be a parallel universe - in fact, there may be an infinite number

of parallel universes, and we just happen to live in one of them. These other universes contain space,

time and strange forms of exotic matter. Some of them may even contain you, in a slightly different form.

Astonishingly, scientists believe that these parallel universes exist less than one millimetre away from us.

In fact, our gravity is just a weak signal leaking out of another universe into ours.

Awesome fiction from James Cameron, but mathematically certain to be 100% real in one of the many

of the parallel universes scientists now believe must exist... or rather in an infinite number of them!

The same but different

For years parallel universes were a staple of the Twilight Zone. Science fiction writers loved to speculate on

the possible other universes which might exist. In one, they said, Elvis Presley might still be alive or in another

the British Empire might still be going strong. Serious scientists dismissed all this speculation as absurd. But now it seems the speculation wasn't absurd enough. Parallel universes really do exist and they are much stranger than even the science

fiction writers dared to imagine.

Greater dimensions

It all started when superstring theory, hyperspace and dark matter made physicists realise that the three

dimensions we thought described the Universe weren't enough. There are actually 11 dimensions. By the

time they had finished they'd come to the conclusion that our Universe is just one bubble among an infinite

number of membranous bubbles which ripple as they wobble through the eleventh dimension.

A creative touch

Our own Earth, we think of it, and us as being unique. If the latest scientific theories are correct, there

are actually an infinite number of earths spread throughout our universe, and many more in parallel

universes, many with copies of us living identical lives, and thinking identical thoughts.

Mind blowing, isn't it?

Now imagine what might happen if two such bubble universes touched. Neil Turok from Cambridge, Burt Ovrut

from the University of Pennsylvania and Paul Steinhardt from Princeton believe that has happened. The result?

A very big bang indeed and a new universe was born - our Universe. The idea has shocked the scientific

community; it turns the conventional Big Bang theory on its head. It may well be that the Big Bang wasn't

really the beginning of everything after all. Time and space all existed before it. In fact Big Bangs may happen

all the time.

Of course this extraordinary story about the origin of our Universe has one alarming implication. If a collision

started our Universe, could it happen again? Anything is possible in this extra-dimensional cosmos. Perhaps out

there in space there is another universe heading directly towards us - it may only be a matter of time before we

collide.

Horizon, originally shown on BBC2 is now available for download & viewing on BBC iPlayer in the UK, and can be

downloaded via Vuze internationally.