LH13109
- Numerical simulation of superstring theory suggests a totally new picture of how our universe began. According to the standard Big Bang scenario, our universe was extremely small when it began about 14 billion years ago. Therefore, in order to study how it actually began, one needs to extend Einstein's general theory of relativity to make it consistent with quantum mechanics. One of the most promising approaches is superstring theory, which enables quantum description of gravity as well as all the fundamental interactions and the matters in a unified fashion. However, the theory requires the space-time to have (9+1)-dimensions, and how to reconcile this fact with the observed (3+1)-dimensional universe has been a big mistery. It is difficult to address this issue in conventional formulations of the theory based on Feynman diagrams due to their inability to take full account of strong coupling dynamics of superstrings. In this paper a new formulation of superstring theory based on large matrices is used to overcome this problem. Numerical simulation suggests that the space was indeed nine-dimensional up to some critical time, after which only three out of nine spatial directions started to expand.
