The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos

by Brian Greene

To a group of researchers including Paul Steinhardt, Neil Turok, Burt Ovrut, and Justin Khoury, this cataclysm rang not just of an end but of a beginning. An intensely hot, thoroughly dense environment in which particles stream this way and that sounds much like the conditions just after the big bang. Perhaps, then, when two branes collide they wipe out whatever structures may have coalesced during either of their histories, from galaxies to planets to people, while setting the stage for a cosmic rebirth. Indeed, a three-brane filled with a blistering plasma of particles and radiation responds just as an ordinary three-dimensional spatial expanse would: it expands. And as it does, the environment cools, allowing particles to clump, ultimately yielding the next generation of stars and galaxies. Some have suggested that an apt name for this reprocessing of universes would be the big splat.