Name: NOVA
Genre: Documentary

NOVA Episode 31.05 The Elegant Universe: Welcome to the 11th Dimension (3)

NOVA Episode 31.05 The Elegant Universe: Welcome to the 11th Dimension (3)

Episode Premiere

November 4, 2003

Genre

Documentary

Production Company

GBH

Official Site

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/

Information

Episode Premiere

November 4, 2003

Genre

Documentary

Period

1974 -

Production Co

GBH

Distributor

PBS

Official Site

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/

Cast and Crew

Director

Joseph McMaster, Julia Cort

Additional Cast

Brian Greene

Synopsis

Part 3 of "The Elegant Universe” with host Brian Greene shows how Edward Witten of Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, aided by others, revolutionized string theory by successfully uniting the five different versions into a single theory that is cryptically named "M-theory," a development that requires a total of eleven dimensions.

Ten...eleven...who's counting? But the new 11th dimension implies that strings can come in shapes called membranes, or "branes" for short. These have truly science fiction-like qualities, since in principle they can be as large as the universe. A brane can even be a universe—a parallel universe—and we may be living on one right now.