So I dredged this up out of memory and spent like half an hour googling for it... You sure end up in a lot of blind alleys googling things like "phase boundary." Essentially this guy has modeled traditional physics in terms of crystalline growth. I'll let him speak, but it's kind of a neat tie-in to what "actual physicists" think up....
"In the beginning, space was filled with a liquid hovering below its normal freezing point. Super cooled liquids like this are on a hair-trigger: the merest nudge is enough to set off a runaway frenzy of freezing. That nudge might be provided by a dust-like impurity in the liquid or perhaps by a small region which by chance is a little colder than the rest. Whatever it was, something triggered the cosmic liquid, seeding a crystal that grew explosively, racing outwards.
Does this scenario ring any bells? According to Michael Grady from the University of New York College at Fredonia, it should. He is convinced that the seeding of the crystal is nothing other than the big bang, which spawned our Universe.
As Grady sees it, all sorts of mysterious observations fall into place if our Universe was brought into being by such a phase nucleation event, triggering a transition from liquid to solid in a pre-existing fluid.
If this extraordinary idea hasn't fazed you yet, hold onto your hat. For the liquid Grady has in mind is unlike any liquid you have ever imagined. Instead of the familiar three space dimensions and one time dimension of the world we see, Grady's liquid would have filled four dimensions of space and one of time - a total of five dimensions. "For want of a better word I call it 'protospace'." says Grady.
So why do we see only three space dimensions? Grady's answer is that we are stuck on the expanding solid surface, Imagine an ordinary crystal growing in a familiar three-dimensional liquid. The boundary between the crystal and the liquid is two-dimensional, like the surface of an expanding soap bubble. But in the strange liquid envisaged by Grady-one with four space dimensions-the phase boundary is a three-dimensional surface, something that is impossible to visualize. "That is our universe," says Grady. "We think we're in a three-dimensional Universe but we're actually riding the surface of four-dimensional bubble."
So what about time? In Grady's version of the Universe, time comes in two distinct varieties. First there is the "universal time" which ticks away in the bulk liquid. This time is completely hidden from us, because our Universe exists only on the surface. The second kind is the time we experience. This, Grady believes, arises as we are carried along the fourth space dimension, perpendicular to the phase boundary. "What we perceive as time is actually the extra space dimension." says Grady. "It is different from the other space dimensions because it extends out of the phase boundary and so is inaccessible."
- whole article ->http://www.chaospark.com/science/crystal.htm
actual paper it's based on, in case we have any mathematicians/physicists in the house. ->http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/9805076
