Ekpyrotic Universe

I remember studying advanced stellar structure under Professor Ian Roxburgh from QMW, especially one of those guest lecture visits by his academic grandfather Fred Hoyle(ie Hoyle was The PhD Supervisor of a professor who himself was The Phd Supervisor of my professor). Fred Hoyle's lecture was his celebrated yet controversial Steady State Theory as an alternative to the Big Bang Theory.

I wonder what he would have made of the Ekpyrotic Model of the Universe?

Are we in a 4 dimensional spacetime bounded by an infinitely sized dimension existing as a brane wall within an 11 dimensional universe(yes forget 26 dimensional bosonic string theory!). This could be the ekpyrotic model which is an alternative to big bang theory. How about a parallel universe bounded by its own brane wall that bounced against our universe's brane wall 14 billion years ago?

So what is the current issue with inflationary cosmology? How does one explain away that the radius of the universe at that inflationary time increased faster than the speed of light?



Mathematics though D-Brane theory (for Dirichlet boundary condition)states that we exist in 11 dimensions. We are already aware of 4 of them, the rest are either curled up into strings(via Professor Michael Green's String Theory, also from QMW ) which are vibrational modes of energy at the sub-planck scale 10-^34m or infinite as our bounded brane wall.