I thought I had a fairly decent, laymen’s gross understanding of String Theory. Boy, was I ever wrong. I’m just ever so confused after reading The Myth of the Beginning of Time, a Scientific American article from a few months ago.
I don’t even understand what problem they’re trying to solve. It seems reasonably obvious to me that a universe that grew out of a single occurrence would have homogeneous properties associated with it. I don’t understand why certain areas of the universe would need to be able to communicate with other areas to tell them how to behave.
Maybe it’s just that I don’t know the underlying maths, or maybe the model (or my understanding of the model) is too crude.
Anyway, it’s an interesting read if you’re interested in that kind of stuff.