Parallel Worlds: A Journey Through Creation, Higher Dimensions, and the Future of the Cosmos

Since the time of the Greeks, scientists have thought that the universe we see today represents the broken, shattered remnants of a greater simplicity, and our goal is to reveal this unification.

This means that our true "mother" sun was actually an unnamed star or collection of stars that died billions of years ago in a supernova, which then seeded nearby nebulae with the higher elements beyond iron that make up our body. Literally, our bodies are made of stardust, from stars that died billions of years ago.

It was once thought that the titanic energy released by a supernova destroyed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. A supernova about ten light-years away could, in fact, end all life on Earth. Fortunately, the giant stars Spica and Betelgeuse are 260 and 430 light-years away, respectively, too far to cause much serious damage to Earth when they finally explode. But some scientists believe that a minor extinction of sea creatures 2 million years ago was caused by a supernova explosion of a star 120 light-years away.

Today, as the result of discoveries in physics, we know that the big bang did produce most of the deuterium, helium-3, helium-4, and lithium-7 we see in nature. But the heavier elements up to iron were mostly cooked in the cores of the stars, as Hoyle believed.

(In 1868, scientists analyzed light from the Sun that was sent through a prism. The deflected sunlight broke up into the usual rainbow of colors and spectral lines, but the scientists also detected faint spectral lines caused by a mysterious element never seen before. They mistakenly thought it was a metal, whose names usually end in "ium," like lithium and uranium. They named this mystery metal after the Greek word for sun, "helios." Finally in 1895, helium was found on Earth in uranium deposits, and scientists embarrassingly discovered that it was a gas, not a metal. Thus, helium, first discovered in the Sun, was born as a misnomer.)

In 1949, both Hoyle and Gamow were invited by the British Broadcasting Corporation to debate the origin of the universe. During the broadcast, Hoyle made history when he took a swipe at the rival theory. He said fatefully, "These theories were based on the hypothesis that all the matter in the universe was created in one big bang at a particular time in the remote past." The name stuck. The rival theory was now officially christened "the big bang" by its greatest enemy.

But the man least likely to provide the third great proof of the big bang via nucleosynthesis was Fred Hoyle, a man who ironically spent almost his entire professional life trying to disprove the big bang theory.

Police use the Doppler effect to calculate your speed; they flash a laser beam onto your car, which reflects back to the police car.

The cover of Time magazine on March 6, 1995, showing the great spiral galaxy M100, claimed "Cosmology is in chaos." Cosmology was being thrown into turmoil because the latest data from the Hubble space telescope seemed to indicate that the universe was younger than its oldest star, a scientific impossibility. The data indicated that the universe was between 8 billion and 12 billion years old, while some believed the oldest star to be as much as 14 billion years old.

The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, it is queerer than we can suppose.
—J. B. S. Haldane