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Could We Find a Door To A Parallel Universe?

Posted by Zonk on from the alternate-me-is-posting-this-in-esperanto dept.

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."'"

8 of 327 comments (clear)

  1. Most useless press release ever by Wonko+the+Sane · · Score: 5, Insightful

    How about publicizing actual discoveries instead of random speculation?

    1. Re:Most useless press release ever by An.+(Coward) · · Score: 5, Funny

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

    2. Re:Most useless press release ever by PinkPanther · · Score: 5, Funny

      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...

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      It's a simple matter of complex programming.
    3. Re:Most useless press release ever by farkus888 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

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      thats right, I rarely use capitals. deal with it. but don't mistake my laziness for stupidity
  2. Sounds like science fiction by geek · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  3. We published this already by Geoffrey.landis · · Score: 5, Informative
    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.

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    http://www.geoffreylandis.com
  4. Re:Sorry guys, can't resist by Namlak · · Score: 5, Funny

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

  5. Re:Sqrt(Negative energy) = head hurts by Manchot · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?