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Time Dimension To Become Space-like

Posted by Zonk on from the you're-not-thinking-fourth-dimensionally dept.

KentuckyFC writes "The Universe is about to flip from having three dimensions of space and one of time to having four dimensions of space. That's the conclusion of a group of Spanish astrophysicists who have calculated that observers inside such a Universe would see it expanding and accelerating away from them just before the flip (abstract, full paper pdf on the physics arXiv). 'We show that regular changes of signature on brane-worlds in AdS bulks may account for some types of the recently fashionable sudden singularities. Therefore, the fact that the Universe seems to approach a future sudden singularity at an accelerated rate of expansion might simply be an indication that our braneworld is about to change from Lorentzian to Euclidean signature. Both the brane and the bulk remain fully regular everywhere.'" Update: 10/09 16:06 GMT by Z : A few readers have written in to point out that the article is not peer-reviewed; your mileage may vary.

1 of 587 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Time speeding up by dissy · · Score: 5, Informative

    The big-bang didn't happen sometime in the limitless void of space, the big-bang was the creation of the space-time continuum itself. Not according to current brane and bulk theories. In them, time and space existed forever, and still do. The big bang is just a massive release of energy, that reorders the energy and matter within our brane in a way that appears everything is moving away from that 4d point.

    One suggestion was that two branes within the bulk colided, and all that energy that has to go somewhere goes into a big bang in a 4d brane (the bulk is either 10 or lately 11 dinentions while we are just in 4)

    If those theories are correct, both time and space existed before the big bang, and also at some point in the future our brane will collide with another again and cause another big bang. This happens through out all the branes at different times and repeats forever.

    Note that I word my post as if "this is", when it should be pointed out that my wording is this way "if these theories are right", so please take it as such.