Thank you, Becky, for the blog party! Happy 115th post! Visit all the participants at Wonders Never Cease. May I bring something to the party? How about—a universe?

This may or may not be true, but it’s a fair description of opinions that a number of respectable scientists seriously appear to hold. And it really gets me.

It’s not just that all the stars and galaxies without number in our universe all came out of what can only be described as nothing much. When you look out into the darkness of night between the stars, you are actually seeing the distant past from before the stars were born. And the universe is still expanding. Some say it will continue expanding indefinitely, so that eventually all of our far and eventually even our near neighbors will be beyond the event horizon and therefore invisible to us in an increasingly dark and lonely world.

It’s not just that we have unobservably tiny particles with adorable names like muons and charmed quarks. And best of all are the strings—one-dimensional particles tinier than can be detected even in theory, miniscule units of resonant, vibrating energy out of which all matter is made.

It’s not even that they’re now saying that the universe comprises not four dimensions (three of space plus time) as we perceive it but actually ten dimensions. Or maybe eleven, depending on which set of mathematics you buy into. And where are the other dimensions, you might ask? It’s a reasonable question. They’re all very, very tiny and curled in around themselves at every infinitesimal point of intersection of the three dimensions we perceive. There. I’m glad I could answer that question for you.

And speaking of sets of mathematics, there are now a number of alternate theories explaining what’s going on in the domains of the very tiny, the very distant, and the very long ago and far away. The mathematics behind these theories is so complex that only a computer system can reconcile them. The theory behind this reconciliation, M-theory, holds that each individual version of string theory encapsulates a part of the truth, a viewpoint about the cosmos. The truth is: Human beings invented this stuff, but we can no longer comprehend it. At least not yet.

But what really gets me are the branes. A brane (short for “membrane”) is a surface of any number of dimensions that forms an elemental unit or building block of the cosmos. At its smallest, a brane might be a string (tiny vibrating unit of matter/energy too small to be measured; see above). At its largest, well… Some scientists think that the entire universe as we know it is just one brane in a larger structure of multiple universes. Some scientists have speculated that our universe (brane) is connected by a single string (brane) to another entire universe (brane) from which it was sundered during the Big Bang. The connecting brane is stretching and stretching as the two universes drift farther and farther apart, but some day, zillions of years from now, the connecting brane will grow so taut that it will begin to pull the two universes back together again. Zillions more years later the universes will collide and all matter and energy will collapse into, well, nothing much, until the next Big Bang comes along.

Until we can find out what substance the physicists are on and get some for ourselves, how can science fiction writers possibly hope to come up with anything this good?