Changes

|date= 14 February 2002

|date= 14 February 2002

|publisher=BBC

|publisher=BBC

|url=http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2001/parallelunitrans.shtml

|url=https://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2001/parallelunitrans.shtml

|quote=NARRATOR: If everything in the Universe was to be explained then String Theory and the Big Bang would now seamlessly merge and they'd complement each other perfectly. After all, one concerned the birth of the Universe and the other all the matter in it. It was surely a foregone conclusion. Physics seemed to be on the edge of glory, but it all went terribly wrong. Try as they might they just couldn't get the two ideas to merge and then, after 10 years of struggling, something even worse happened: their two pet theories now began to self-destruct. The first problem appeared with the Big Bang. The cosmologists had assumed that as they worked backwards in time they would eventually work their way back all the way to the beginning of the Big Bang. There would be no awkward gaps, but after years of end-less refinement there was one gap which refused to disappear, the most important one of all. ALAN GUTH: In spite of the fact that we call it the Big Bang Theory it really says absolutely nothing about the Big Bang. It doesn't tell us what banged, why it banged, what caused it to bang. It doesn't even describe, doesn't really allow us to predict what the conditions are immediately after this bang. MICHIO KAKU: The fundamental problem of cosmology is that the laws of physics as we know them break down at the instant of the Big Bang. Well some people say what's wrong with that, what's wrong with having the laws of physics collapse? Well for a physicist this is a disaster. All our lives we've dedicated to the proposition that the Universe obeys knowable laws, laws that can be written down in the language of mathematics and here we have the centrepiece of the Universe itself, a missing piece beyond physical law. NARRATOR: The very beginning of the Big Bang was the single biggest mystery in all of cosmology. It was called the singularity. PAUL STEINHARDT: When you extrapolate Einstein's general Theory of Relativity back to the beginning you discover what we call a singularity, a cosmic singularity, which is to say that the equations blow up.}}</ref>  

|quote=NARRATOR: If everything in the Universe was to be explained then String Theory and the Big Bang would now seamlessly merge and they'd complement each other perfectly. After all, one concerned the birth of the Universe and the other all the matter in it. It was surely a foregone conclusion. Physics seemed to be on the edge of glory, but it all went terribly wrong. Try as they might they just couldn't get the two ideas to merge and then, after 10 years of struggling, something even worse happened: their two pet theories now began to self-destruct. The first problem appeared with the Big Bang. The cosmologists had assumed that as they worked backwards in time they would eventually work their way back all the way to the beginning of the Big Bang. There would be no awkward gaps, but after years of end-less refinement there was one gap which refused to disappear, the most important one of all. ALAN GUTH: In spite of the fact that we call it the Big Bang Theory it really says absolutely nothing about the Big Bang. It doesn't tell us what banged, why it banged, what caused it to bang. It doesn't even describe, doesn't really allow us to predict what the conditions are immediately after this bang. MICHIO KAKU: The fundamental problem of cosmology is that the laws of physics as we know them break down at the instant of the Big Bang. Well some people say what's wrong with that, what's wrong with having the laws of physics collapse? Well for a physicist this is a disaster. All our lives we've dedicated to the proposition that the Universe obeys knowable laws, laws that can be written down in the language of mathematics and here we have the centrepiece of the Universe itself, a missing piece beyond physical law. NARRATOR: The very beginning of the Big Bang was the single biggest mystery in all of cosmology. It was called the singularity. PAUL STEINHARDT: When you extrapolate Einstein's general Theory of Relativity back to the beginning you discover what we call a singularity, a cosmic singularity, which is to say that the equations blow up.}}</ref>