Extract from Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time

"There are something like ten million million million million million million million million million million million million million million (1 with eighty zeroes after it) particles in the region of the universe that we can observe. Where did they all come from? The answer is that, in quantum theory, particles can be created out of energy in the form of particle/antiparticle parts. But that just raises the question of where the energy came from. The answer is that the total energy of the universe is exactly zero. The matter in the universe is made out of positive energy. However, the matter is all attracting itself by gravity. Two pieces of matter that are close to each other have less energy than the same two pieces a long way apart, because you have to expend energy to separate them against the gravitational force that is pulling them together. Thus in a sense, the gravitational field has negative energy. In the case of a universe that is approximately uniform in space, one can show that this negative gravitational energy exactly cancels the positive energy represented by the matter. So the total energy of the universe is zero." -Stephen Hawking

Magnificent.

Was our universe born inside a black hole in another universe?

The current explanation of the universe's origins relies on clumsy assumptions and can't explain most subatomic particles. A small tweak to general relativity solves these problems - and seemingly proves the universe must have come from a black hole elsewhere.

As it stands right now, the explanation for the universe's beginnings is built around a combination of Einstein's general relativity and observation of the ancient universe. Mixing these two theories together creates some problems - for instance, the universe is impossibly large according to its current rate of expansion, so astrophysicists have to invoke the idea of inflation, in which the early universe expanded at a tremendous rate within the first second after the Big Bang.

General relativity, however, can't explain inflation, so another theory is required to account for it. There's nothing technically wrong with that, but it's an inelegant solution, and physicists tend to prefer an all-encompassing explanation to a bunch of piecemeal solutions. That's not the only issue with the current explanation - it can't deal with many properties of subatomic particles, consigning them entirely to the realm of quantum mechanics.

Nikodem Poplawski of Indiana University thinks solving the latter problem can also solve the former, and that's just the start of the craziness. In a new paper, he explains that the standard version of general relativity totally ignores the intrinsic momentum of subatomic particles like protons and neutrons, but a modified version known as the Einstein-Cartan-Kibble-Sciama theory of gravity solves that problem. The theory states these particles interact repulsively, creating tiny amounts of a force called torsion.

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The Search For Hidden Dimensions

I'm so glad there are these clever people in the world. This is simply amazing.

Brian Greene explains how extra dimensions may solve several problems in physics, and gives his stance on the possibility of a "multi-verse".

To learn more about String Theory, watch Brian Greene's "The Elegant Universe" on NOVA