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."'"

Comments

Yes, it's called the "portal"

[Anonymous Coward]

Geesh, this isn't new news, it happened back in the 1960's... as I recall it was on stardate 3134.0
we sent a captain, a doctor, and a scientist through the portal. Geesh, people have been talking about it for 40 years now.

Sorry guys, can't resist

[CrazyJim1]

In Soviet Russia, the door to a parallel universe finds us.

Re:Sorry guys, can't resist

[Namlak]

Actually, in Soviet Russia, the parallel universe find a door to YOU!

Most useless press release ever

[Wonko the Sane]

How about publicizing actual discoveries instead of random speculation?

Re:Most useless press release ever

[An. (Coward)]

Evidence schmevidence, I for one won't believe in any of this black hole nonsense until I actually see one.

Re:Most useless press release ever

[PinkPanther]

I for one won't believe in any of this black hole nonsense until I actually see one

I was going to post a Google Images link, but without SafeSearch the result list isn't exactly what you might expect...

Re:Most useless press release ever

[farkus888]

this post being modded insightful bothers me, because it is actually a perfect example of having no insight into the situation.

1. Define the question
2. Gather information and resources (observe)
3. Form hypothesis
4. Perform experiment and collect data
5. Analyze data
6. Interpret data and draw conclusions that serve as a starting point for new hypothesis
7. Publish results
8. Retest (frequently done by other scientists)

taken from wikipedia those are the steps of the scientific method. I remember them from middle school, so I imagine most of this crowd should have been over them at some point. This article is a perfect example of step 3 in my opinion. step 2 is all of the already observed behavior of matter in the universe. here in step three we form a hypothesis about some detail that is unexplained or not understood. step 4, which these people have not gotten too yet, is to figure out a method to perform tests to prove or disprove their hypothesis and perform those tests. then they will analyze the results of their test, step 5. skipping over this step would leave them with no direction to take in their research, so they would probably never figure out anything.

Re:Most useless press release ever

[ptbarnett]

Evidence schmevidence, I for one won't believe in any of this black hole nonsense until I actually see one.

Warning! Do not look into black hole with remaining eye!

http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20080131

Sounds like science fiction

[geek]

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.

Sqrt(Negative energy) = head hurts

[G4from128k]

IANAP, but most "energy" variables can be thought of as the square of some other physical properties (kinetic energy is related to velocity squared, electrical energy is related to voltage or current squared, etc.) So to get "negative energy", it would seem that we need imaginary (as in the number i = sqrt(-1) ) values of velocity, voltage, current, etc. So now my brain hurts (and the real physicists on slashdot can enjoy ripping me to shreds or educating me as is their wont)

Re:Sqrt(Negative energy) = head hurts

[Manchot]

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?

It's the Beard.

[0100010001010011]

"possible way to tell the two kinds of object apart"

It's the beard. We've known this for some time.

Does any of this matter really matter?

[Stanislav_J]

We had "anti-matter," "dark matter," now "phantom matter." Jesus, is there anything substantial and real in physics anymore? As the years go on, physics starts to sound less and less like science and more and more like "Alice in Wonderland." Everything seems to hinge on things we can't see, or can't measure, or can't prove. Unless some of this mumbo jumbo can give me eternal life, make women throw themselves at me, or build a better and more luscious cheeseburger, I'm not interested.

Re:Does any of this matter really matter?

[Mr_Huber]

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?

Re:Does any of this matter really matter?

[Xelios]

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?

Don't lump them together

[SEE]

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.

We published this already

[Geoffrey.landis]

This is interesting, but looking at the article, i can't see that it's much different from work that we published over a decade back in a paper where we pointed out properties of wormholes, and noted that they might be visible by the signature of the negative effective mass on the bending of light: Natural Wormholes as Gravitational Lenses, John G. Cramer, Robert L. Forward, Michael S. Morris, Matt Visser, Gregory Benford, Geoffrey A. Landis. U.C. Irvine even wrote a press release about this paper, which I've put on my website.

It's a little hard to tell from this very brief article, but what he calls "phantom matter" is what other physicists call "exotic matter" or sometimes "negative matter," which violates one of the positive energy-conditions, and thus has negative energy (in some reference frame). Matt Visser's book Lorentzian Wormholes has a lot more technical details about the various formulations of the positive-energy conditions.