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Could We Find a Door To A Parallel Universe?
p1234 writes "Though no direct evidence for wormholes has been observed, this could be because they are disguised as black holes. Now Alexander Shatskiy of the Lebedev Physical Institute in Moscow, Russia, is suggesting a possible way to tell the two kinds of object apart. His idea assumes the existence of a bizarre substance called "phantom matter", which has been proposed to explain how wormholes might stay open. Phantom matter has negative energy and negative mass, so it creates a repulsive effect that prevents the wormhole closing. 'US expert Dr Lawrence Krauss, from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, points out that the idea rests on untested assumptions. He told New Scientist magazine: "It is an interesting attempt to actually think of what a real signature for a wormhole would be, but it is more hypothetical than observational. Without any idea of what phantom matter is and its possible interactions with light, it is not clear one can provide a general argument."'"
How about publicizing actual discoveries instead of random speculation?
It's like proving something exists buy using something that doesn't exist. I admire the guys imagination though. Just seems like he wants it to exist so he's making it so. IMHO science should be about working with the facts, which isn't what's going on here.
Are you really that surprised? We worked out how most of the world around us works over three hundred years ago. We put electromagnetism to bed over a hundred years ago. We've known enough about atoms to make them go *boom* real good for over eighty years. Everything left to work on is far, far outside our day to day experience. Our common sense is calibrated for temperatures between about zero and one hundred C in a thick nitrogen/oxygen environment with a 1 g gravitational field. Of course it fails miserably when confronted by absolute zero vacuums or temperatures and pressures extreme enough to fuse matter or places with gravitational fields strong enough to capture light.
Hell, I'd be more surprised if someone announced "Black Holes: Just Like Detroit" or some such.
And as for that eternal life and women throwing themselves at you, we've already given you healthy diets and pheromones. Why not try meeting us half-way?
Antimatter is something real, observed, understood, and which we can actually make, albeit in tiny quantities.
Dark matter is a shim used to make our theory of gravity and the motion of the observed universe match.
"Phantom matter", properly called "exotic matter", is a purely hypothetical construct, not necessary to explain anything in the universe which has been observed; it's just something the laws of physics don't rule out.
Physics has been running into a wall for decades now. I think the problem is gravity, we still don't know what it is or how it operates. We say it warps space, but does it really or is that just a mathematical abstraction that lets us model its effects? Physicists have gotten something fundemental wrong, and it's leading them to shape ridiculous explanations for things we don't understand.
That's my speculation, do I get an article in New Scientist now?
Murphey's fighting Occam, and we're in the stands.
The set of complex numbers is no less "real" than the set of real numbers. Both are simply definitions arising from some set of mathematical axioms, usually those of an axiomatic set theory like ZFC. In fact, the definition of i as sqrt(-1) that you learn in high school is mathematically unsound: the correct way to define the complex numbers is as the set of ordered pairs of real numbers. When combined with an expected addition (a,b)+(c,d)=(a+c,b+d) and a funky multiplication (a,b)*(c,d) = (ac-bd,bc+ad), this allows you to define a+bi as shorthand for (a,b). (Note that i*i=(0,1)*(0,1)=(0-1,0+0)=(-1,0)=-1, as expected.)
Neither the real and complex numbers are "real" in the sense that they physically exist, but are on equal footing in the sense that they represent real, physical quantities. Complex quantities simply appear when dealing with pairs of real quantities. Take the (complex) wavefunction representing a quantum state, as an example. Sure, you could formulate the Schroedinger equation as a pair of coupled differential equations, but why bother, especially when it's much more elegant to express it as a single, complex equation?