BBC Focus Magazine

[M Paul Lloyd]

Lets just run that by us one more time?
"Once Upon a Time, the Universe Was Really Weird"
But.... two dimensional? Really?
Another bit of theoretical nonsen.... physics intended to explain something that I cannot help but feel really shouldn't need explaining, but hey-ho... what do I know?

Today, looking out across a seemingly boundless cosmos filled with an unimaginable variety of exotic objects, it's easy to forget that the Universe we currently admire is the product of a violent event that occurred 13.75 billion years ago.
As we know, the leading theory for universal birth is the Big Bang, where everything came from nothing, in a single energetic burst of inexplicable creation. So, if we turn back the clock back 13.75 billion years, what would we see? My instinct would be to say "energy, the Universe was filled with pure, violent energy," but according to some mind-bending work by Jonas Mureika from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, Calif., and Dejan Stojkovic from SUNY at Buffalo in Buffalo, New York, the answer may be a little more complicated than that. In fact, it may be so weird that we can't even imagine what it would have been like.
According to an interview with PhysOrg.com, Mureika and Stojkovic have calculated that the early universe didn't only possess a hot, energetic primordial state of matter, but it also had a primordial state of dimensions.
If they're correct, the three dimensions of space and one dimension of time that make the four-dimensional spacetime we live in today isn't how it's always been -- the Universe may have existed in a lower dimensional state in the past.

http://news.discovery.com/space/once-up ... 10321.html

[Hyrulian Outlaw]

I think it's pretty bloody weird now...........

[M Paul Lloyd]

Indeed.

[Shadowwolf]

...physics intended to explain something that I cannot help but feel really shouldn't need explaining,

Correct me if I'm wrong but it's not like there is any other explanation is there?

Now I realise that the lack of an explanation does not make this one right by default and it's not like they're just pulling it out of their backsides, seems like a reasonable attempt even if it is weird.

Besides, the articles got Sagan in it, kudos right there

[M Paul Lloyd]

Well, as I said "what do I know?".

[Shadowwolf]

Indeed, but why do you think that what this attempts to explain is something that does not need explaining or have I taken your words up wrong?

[M Paul Lloyd]

I think I should probably have used considerably less words Mr.S, call it 'thinking aloud' if you will? but I suppose I am subconciously alluding to the idea that this is possibly yet another complication in a universal model that becomes evermore complicated with each new theory that comes along. A situation remenisent of ever more spheres within spheres of old and all I can see is Poor old Aristarcus of Samos being told that the solar system had to be geo-centric or we would all fall off the Earth.......

However I still feel that all theories should get a fair and equal airing regardless of whether I agree with them, so when I came across this one I thought 'best get that posted'... .