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

November 4, 2003
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NOVAĀ - S31Ā - E5

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

Part 3 of "The Elegant Universeā€ 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 universeā€”a parallel universeā€”and we may be living on one right now.

NOVA: Season 31 - 18 Episode s