[THROUGH THE WORMHOLE]
Morgan Freeman
S02E04
EXCERPTS:
FOUR FORCES:
Physicists have discovered
that we live in a world governed by four primal forces.
There is electromagnetism,
the force that affects objects with electric charge...
The strong nuclear force,
whose power is unleashed in nuclear weapons,
and the weak nuclear force
that triggers radioactive decay.
These first three forces are all roughly equal in strength.
But the fourth force,
gravity,
is much weaker.
In fact, it's around a trillion, trillion, trillion times
weaker than the other three.
The idea that extra dimensions
might be a hidden part of our reality is as old as Plato.
He imagined the world we live in
to be like the wall of a cave lit by firelight.
Shadows dance across our two-dimensional world
cast by objects in the body of the cave
in a third dimension that's hidden from us.
Scientist are convinced dark matter exists
because it's affecting the way stars rotate around galaxies.
The gravitational pull of it is so strong,
that they estimate dark matter
outweighs normal matter by five to one.
Any particle that is moving must have energy,
and according to the most famous equation in all physics,
if you have energy, you have mass. [E=mc2]
Fermi (telescope) has already discovered a sea of gamma rays
emanating from the center of our galaxy.
But much more work is needed
to prove this signal is coming from the fourth dimension
The Fermi Telescope will continue gathering evidence
from the depths of space until around 2015.
STRING THEORY
String theory says that every single particle of matter
and energy in the Universe
is actually a tiny, vibrating string...
A string that vibrates not in three dimensions, but in nine.
If string theory is right, at every point in space,
there are six extra dimensions curled up incredibly tight.
These hidden dimensions could solve all the mysteries of physics.
But there's a problem.
Since string theory was first proposed over 40 years ago,
there's not a single shred of evidence to support it.
LHC - Large Hadron Collider
17 mile long curcular racetrack
designed to smash subatomic particles together.
... identified dozens of tiny subatomic particles,
the basic building blocks of matter.
But they've never seen the strings
that lie at the heart of each of these particles.
String theory predicts that they must be
a trillion, trillion times smaller than an atom.
Put that another way --
if an atom were the size of the solar system,
a string would be the size of a light bulb.
And the smaller an object is,
the more energy it takes to see it.
If you want to make a collider
that will actually produce something like strings,
it would take an accelerator much bigger than the LHC,
much bigger than the Earth,
the circumference of the Earth,
possibly much bigger than the Milky Way.
THE MORE DIMENSIONS THERE ARE,
THE FASTER THE FORCE OF GRAVITY CHANGES WITH DISTANCE.
But if her experiment is successful,
she'll create something never before seen on Earth --
a black hole.
Maria: It is quite possible the LHC experiment
can produce the so-called microscopic black holes.
But don't worry about moving to Mars just yet.
The black holes Maria and her colleagues expect to create
are tiny...
so tiny that they will evaporate in a fraction of a second.
Parallel Universe:
As gravitons move from the dense-gravity brane to our brane,
they spread out, and their force gets far weaker.
Things get rescaled
as you go from one place in an extra dimension to the other.
so whereas things might be extremely heavy here,
they could be exponentially lighter here,
which would naturally explain why gravity is so weak.
Lisa Randall's idea of a warped fourth dimension
separating us from a parallel universe,
where gravity is just as strong as the other foces of nature,
has set the world of physics alight.
Einstein realized that gravity could be seen
as simply a bending of space by massive objects.
His theory of general relativity
was a masterpiece of modern physics.
But it left a serious problem unsolved --
how does gravity affect space on the microscopic level?
... then you need an extension of Einstein's theory
because it doesn't cover that range.
Only One Dimension:
In water, ink spread into three dimensions.
On a piece of blotting paper, it spread into two.
But when Renate tested how things spread out
inside her computer-simulated universes,
the result looked something like this.
Watch what happens now.
It filled out much less volumes than we expected
on small scales,
and that's a sure indication
that the dimension's actually smaller than
what we expected.
It's smaller than three.
Renate's simulations
looked like they had three dimensions,
but at root, they only had one.
The space appears to have a smaller and smaller dimension
as you explore it on smaller and smaller scales.
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