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Black Holes and Hidden Dimensions
Slackware Geek writes "It is being reported in the Nature Science Update that a new observitory being built in Argentina to study cosmic rays could detect extra hidden dimensions if they exist. 'Cosmic rays could find holes in Standard Model of particle physics ...If the Universe contains invisible, extra dimensions, then cosmic rays that hit the atmosphere will produce tiny black holes. These black holes should be numerous enough for the observatory to detect.'"
I wonder if this can shed some light on the subject. It talks about modeling a universe where light naturally travels at a fixed radius rather than a straight line. Assuming the radius to be extremely large, the proposed universe would act quite similarly to ours. Assuming an extremely small radius (small as in atomic-level) and I think we may be hitting upon the door of the next dimensions.
Think of it... In a world where light traveled in a fixed radius of one meter, you would see the back of your head if nothing is in the way. And, it would seem, that your head is 6.28 meters away from you. Problem is, you wouldn't be able to see beyond that one-meter radius circle. Now, what if that radius was shrunk to the atomic level... you wouldn't be able to see beyond the circle(sphere?) that the fixed radius spans. Obviously, your eye is way too large to detect that kind of precision.
Thoughts anyone?
IWARS.
People, in general, disappoint me. Politicians even more so.
If I remember correctly, the idea that our universe contains extra tiny dimenions is a key component of string theory. If these hidden dimensions can be proven to exist, then this could lend string theory a lot of credibility.
Extra dimensions weren't predicted back in the 1910's. They were postulated back in the 1920's, by Kaluza and refined by Klein. Kaluza-Klein theory was not ignored; IIRC, Einstein helped Kaluza get a faculty position on the basis of this work. K-K theory had problems though (e.g., the existence of the extra unobserved dilaton field). It got resurrected in the context of grand unified theories, until Witten killed it by showing you couldn't get the Standard Model out of it. (Then he shot down his own proof when working on M-theory, by introducing compactification onto a line segment rather than a closed manifold.)
I do just want to clear things up -
Argentina didn't come up with this science project - the world did. It's an international collaboration of dozens of countries and about 300 scientists worldwide. Argentina was chosen as the southern site of the array due to the location - the array consists of a flourescence detector, which requires stable weather and clear air. The northern site is still under discussion, though it seems most likely to be in Utah (along with the dozen or so other cosmic ray observatories in Utah).
The Auger collaboration is then completely distinct from Argentina's government, so we don't really worry about the governmental problems except for the problems they cause our friends down there and the Argentine portion of the collaboration.