Let me confess up front: I am an expert on none of these subjects, and most of what I'm about to say is my own reasonable informed speculation.One, a brief description of strings in String Theories. Imagine a string, made of pure energy, far, far smaller than an electron; so small, in fact, that we can never observe it. Physicists say it is on the order of a Plank length.
Now vibrate that string in a space-time of eleven dimensions. It turns out that the various vibrations correspond to the actual sub-atomic particles: the electron, the quark, the photon, and so on (there are many more though we aren't usually aware of them). This is the fundamental essence of String Theories (there are quite a number of them) that allegedly tie together General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics -- if you are not familiar with the issue here you should do some further reading, perhaps starting at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_Everything. The point of String Theories is that, if proven (this has been the snag so far) it would allegedly provide a Theory of Everything (TOE).
Onto branes. "A brane, in string theory and related theories such as supergravity theories, is a physical object that generalizes the notion of a point particle to higher dimensions.[1] For example, a point particle can be viewed as a brane of dimension zero, while a string can be viewed as a brane of dimension one. It is also possible to consider higher dimensional branes. In dimension p, these are called p-branes. The word brane comes from the word "membrane" which refers to a two-dimensional brane." (from Wikipedia)
Branes, if they exist, are fascinating objects, and can in fact be quite large, even much, much larger than our entire universe -- a least in theory. There could be many branes of 2+ dimensions floating about the universe, sometimes interacting with ordinary matter with possibly unpleasant results.
But I want to talk about the really big branes. There is a hypothesis -- I think I can call it that -- that our (and probably many others, even an infinite) universe started by the contact of two branes, which supplied the energy to start the Big Bang.
If this is so, then I don't see how my idea could be true. But so much is uncertain (and all unproven) in this field that I can't resist. Let my quote Wikipedia again:
"The holographic principle is a property of quantum gravity and string theories that states that the description of a volume of space can be thought of as encoded on a boundary to the region—preferably a light-like boundary like a gravitational horizon. First proposed by Gerard 't Hooft, it was given a precise string-theory interpretation by Leonard Susskind[1] who combined his ideas with previous ones of 't Hooft and Charles Thorn.[1][2] As pointed out by Raphael Bousso,[3] Thorn observed in 1978 that string theory admits a lower-dimensional description in which gravity emerges from it in what would now be called a holographic way.
In a larger sense, the theory suggests that the entire universe can be seen as a two-dimensional information structure "painted" on the cosmological horizon, such that the three dimensions we observe are only an effective description at macroscopic scales and at low energies. Cosmological holography has not been made mathematically precise, partly because the cosmological horizon has a finite area and grows with time.[4][5]
The holographic principle was inspired by black hole thermodynamics, which implies that the maximal entropy in any region scales with the radius squared, and not cubed as might be expected. In the case of a black hole, the insight was that the informational content of all the objects that have fallen into the hole can be entirely contained in surface fluctuations of the event horizon. The holographic principle resolves the black hole information paradox within the framework of string theory"
Back to my idea. Is it possible that two two dimensional branes, under the right conditions and situation, could intersect, such that their line of intersection becomes the hologram in which one or more holographic three dimensional universes would be generated? If so, I wonder what the cosmological horizon would be construed here. At this point, let me remind the reader that I am no expert in these fields and don't even know how to evaluate my speculation (I cannot, of course, call it a hypothesis)? But I am hoping to generate some discussion -- even if just criticism -- on this.
Thank you.
