Steinhardt, Paul

Paul is the Albert Einstein Professor in Science at Princeton University and Associate Director of the Princeton Center for Theoretical Physics. He is a theorist whose research spans problems in particle physics, astrophysics, cosmology and condensed matter physics.. Known for his early work on the “inflationary model” of the universe, he has recently introduced (with Neil Turok) a radical and competing “cyclic model” based on “brane cosmology,” in which the evolution of the universe is periodic and the key events shaping the large-scale structure of the universe occur before the Big Bang. They theorize that the cosmos was never compacted into a single point, as the Big Bang would have it, and it did not spring forth in a violent instant. Instead, the universe as we know it is a minuscule cross section of a much vaster and ineffably immense universe whose true magnitude is hidden in dimensions we cannot perceive. What we think of as the Big Bang, Paul suggests, was the result of a collision between our three-dimensional world and another three-dimensional world perhaps less than the width of a proton away from ours—right upon us, and yet displaced in a way that renders it absolutely and permanently invisible. Moreover, they say the Big Bang is just the latest in a cycle of cosmic collisions stretching infinitely into the past and into the future. Each collision, which may be separated by a trillion years or more, creates the universe anew. The 13.7-billion-year history of our cosmos is just a moment in this endless expanse of time. The hidden dimensions and colliding worlds in the new model are an outgrowth of superstring theory, an increasingly popular concept in fundamental physics. Paul gives a popular account of his theory in Endless Universe, of which he is co-author.