Tai Mingshen

The University of California in Berkeley publishes a large number of its courses as podcasts and webcasts. Jimmy Ruska has complied a sorted list of the video courses and also provides a large collection of links to other educational resources.

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Richard Panek wrote a very interesting article in the New York Times Magazine this weekend entitled, “Out There”.

Only 4 percent of the universe is made of the kind of matter that makes up you and me and all the planets and stars and galaxies. The rest – 96 percent – is… who knows?

This unknown, mystery mass is known as “dark matter”.

In 1929, Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe appeared to be expanding and astronomers had for many years assumed that gravity would be slowing down this expansion. Two rival teams of cosmologists attempted to prove this theory in the 1990s, but instead had to conclude that the speed of expansion of the universe was actually speeding up. In 1998, Michael Turner produced a paper in which he called this antigravitational force “dark energy”.

Cosmologists and particle physicists agree that a new physics is required to reconcile the theories of general relativity and quantum mechanics. This is where string theory may be able to provide a language which allows understanding and use of both those theories at the same time through the use of numerous non-traditional dimensions (11) and parallel universes (10 to the power of 500).

The Large Hadron Collider, which goes online later this year at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN), may provide evidence of these additional dimensions and, perhaps, provide some answers to the mysteries of dark energy and dark matter.

If dark matter really does exist, then it’s time to rethink the fundamental assumption that when we look up at the night sky, we’re seeing the universe. Just think, all life as we know it and all planets and stars in the estimated 125 billion galaxies in our known universe is nothing more than just a few percent of everything out there. We’re just a drop of pollution in the sea of dark matter…

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“Eleven dimensions, parallel universes and a world made out of strings. It’s not science fiction, it’s string theory.” PBS have many of their excellent educational television programmes available for online viewing. The Elegant Universe is a three hour series with supporting articles and interviews, providing a good introduction to the controversial string theory – an attempt at providing a theory of everything.

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