Hands Up Who Really Understands What Stephen Hawking Is Telling Us?

There is gravity, affecting everything from apples to galaxies. The easiest to understand is the 2-brane concept, which is like the surface of an inflated balloon on which the galaxies and stars are moving through space. We are used to the idea of light being bent by optical lenses, but the general theory of relativity suggested that the gravitational attraction of the stars and galaxies can also bend light. If it can be warped far enough, it may be possible to create a short-cut from one point in space-time to another. Hawking and his colleagues believe that the universe may be like such a brane - and it is expanding like the surface of an inflated balloon. The idea is that matter and light would be confined to the brane so we cannot travel through or see through the extra dimensions,” said Hawking. Anyone by the side of the railway track will not just see the ball’s up and down movement.

They will also see it travel 40 metres in the direction the train is travelling. However, imagine that the table is in the carriage of a fast-moving train travelling at a constant velocity of 40 metres per second. Imagine it takes a second for the ball to bounce up one metre and back again. Hawking cites the metaphor of a ping-pong ball bouncing on a table to explain what this means. Hawking and his colleagues are toying with yet another mind-boggling concept to try to explain what is meant by these hidden dimensions of space. Einstein saw space-time as having four dimensions, with the three dimensions of space and the one dimension of time. It has four dimensions, the three dimensions of space and the one dimension of time. Here particles are described as waves on strings, which have length but no other dimension. For the past 20 years or so, physicists have grown to favour string theory, even though one of its predictions is that space-time has more than the four dimensions imagined by Einstein. Indeed, for the past quarter century, about as long as I have been writing about science, physicists have said they are close to realising their ultimate ambition.

In fact when asked by a journalist at the time of the announcement whether it was true that only three people in the world understood the general theory of relativity, Eddington was said to have replied: “Who’s the third? Einstein came up with a new concept of gravity, which he described as a consequence of the fact that space-time is not flat, as previously supposed, but curved or “warped”. Relativity: Albert Einstein formulated two theories of relativity, the special and the general. It also has another peculiar property - the curved nature of space-time, which is how Einstein explained gravity, can bend light. The curved nature of space-time has also suggested another intriguing concept. This concept has grown into a likely contender for the theory of everything. String theory: A favourite concept to explain a single, unified theory of everything. In this, his first book, Hawking talked about the possibility of discovering a final theory of everything - a theory that can unify all the laws of nature.

It is based on the idea that the basic numbers governing the laws of nature - such as the mass of an electron - seem to be perfect for life. The known forces of nature operate at different levels. And then there are the strong and weak nuclear forces that operate at the level of the atomic nucleus, involving exotic subatomic particles such as quarks, leptons and muons. There could be shadow galaxies, shadow stars and even shadow people,” Hawking said. If particles can be viewed as occupying points in space, and strings are seen as lines, then branes are two dimensional, or even higher-dimensional, entities. If the two observers disagree on the distance the light has travelled, the only way they are going to agree on the known constant speed of light is if the two observers disagree about the time the trip has taken. Hawking, a mathematical cosmologist at Cambridge University, wrote A Brief History of Time, a book that famously attempted to shed light on the deeper recesses of cosmology.