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The Search For Neutrons That Leak Into Our World From Other Universes
KentuckyFC writes: One of the more exciting predictions from "braneworld" theories of high energy physics is that matter can leak out of other universes into our own, and vice versa. The basic idea is that our three-dimensional universe or brane is embedded in a much larger multi-dimensional cosmos. These branes can become coupled so that a quantum particle such as a neutron can exist in a superposition of states in both universes at the same time. When the neutron collides with something, the superposition collapses and the particle must suddenly exist in one brane or the other. That means neutrons from our universe can leak into other branes and then back again. Now physicists are devising an experiment to look for this neutron leakage. They plan to put a well shielded neutron detector next to a shielded nuclear reactor that produces neutrons at a research facility in France. All this shielding means the detector should not see any neutrons from inside the reactor. However, if the neutrons are leaking into another brane and then back into our world, they can bypass this shielding and trigger the detector. The team has not yet set a date for the experiment but the discovery of neutrons (or anything else) leaking into our universe would be huge.
Would this help explain quantum tunneling?
So that's where my car keys go.
What if the other brane also has a reactor shield in the same spot?
If the intent is to avoid false readings wouldn't it make sense *NOT* to put this thing next to a nuclear reactor?
*checks the date*
Nope, not April yet so not sure what this article is doing here.
We need to build a fence to keep these undocumented neutrons out of our Universe and from taking jobs from our neutrons. # IAmNotAScientist
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Every other universe decides to perform this exact same experiment at the exact same place at the exact same time.
Is the spontaneous quantum creation of matter that we've witnessed in space related to multi-dimensional physics? How would we ever test that?
...in the creation of transparent Aluminum....
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
I think I got that when I ate too many olestra laced potato chips
Is neutron leakage ruining your day?
Well, no more! Now with my patented genuine neutron pads neutron leakage will be a thing of the past!
We use only the purest boron from the banks of Rio Tinto to absorb your stray neutrons*.
*Neutrons from other universes are not covered by this product. If the neutron flux is higher than the OHSA limits, bend over and kiss your ass goodbye.
for those cars on the interstate that come out of nowhere.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Have we been tinkering with the ZPM, again??
I hope this doesn't sound ignorant, but isn't the likelihood that a neutron would happen to leak into a tiny fraction of the available space on a single planet in the entire universe... well, mathematically improbable in the extreme? It's much more likely that if there is leakage, the leakage would appear literally anywhere else, rendering the detector rather useless.
would be even huger. Getting the neutrons will be the easy part :-)
the link leakage from unreadable hipster website medium.com.
So that is where dark matter is coming from. The Universe is filling up with someone else's neutrons.
They plan to put a well shielded neutron detector next to a shielded nuclear reactor that produces neutrons at a research facility in France. All this shielding means the detector should not see any neutrons from inside the reactor. However, if the neutrons are leaking into another brane and then back into our world, they can bypass this shielding and trigger the detector.
Seems like the more likely answer is the nuclear reactor isn't as well shielded as they hoped. Besides, how can you have a braneworld if the universe is a simulation of a hologram?
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Now _this_ is the kind of story which should be on Slashdot.
PS: It's nice to see Slashdot Beta disappear; I have not seen it for many weeks now. Did we just win a huge battle with Dice ? :-)
Doesn't anyone screen these submissions?!
#DeleteChrome
With all these Braines, shouldn't there be a lot of zombies chasing them around?
And what are the physics of Zombie Neutron interaction?
This might be a question for Buckaroo Banzai, beyond the the eighth dimension . . .
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
OBZombieRef
Have they searched for unexplained sources of neutrons in our brane? I guess that might indicate a nuclear reactor (or something else interesting) one brane over.
fresh branes!
They are wrong, because String Theory is untestable, Lee Smolin says so!
No no no, in this case the problem is wasteful government spending on research that does not result in marketable consumer products.
Looking means scientists are at work. Nothing to see here. Wake me if they find something, and they get another group to confirm it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
I am not a theoretical physicist, but a neutron state could exist coupled with a neutron state outside the shielded detector (but within our universe). How do you distinguish that?
Somehow I doubt the shielding is perfect. Assuming it's perfect is an awfully big assumption.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Somehow it's way more cool to call this 'another universe' than to call this another part of the same universe, isn't it?
I wonder what the official ISO Linnaeus number is for extreme weakness of physical interaction below which universes are properly botanized.
Insane in the brane!
What ever happened to Occam's Razor?
Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain.
Damn dirty pervert interdimensional communist space ameobas.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
OK, so we have multiple cosmi (space-time continua) embedded in a higher dimensional universe. I'm totally down with that and have written an entire SF novel based on the premise. Those cosmi (as the plural of cosmos) have a coupling. I'm good with that. But that means that "neighboring" cosmi will exist in a coherent bundle, and one will have to get quite distant from "this" brane to find a brane with substantial drift in its general mass distribution.
This is simple statistical mechanics, by the way -- if most brane-to-brane transitions occur in places where there is chuck of mass in one cosmos and none in another cosmos, there will be steady diffusion from the high mass concentration to the low one. This would lead to egregious and painful violation of mass-energy conservation as my foot in this cosmos diffuses into a vacuum in many, many others, because after all, the mass density of any cosmos at all is nearly zero with a hard, hard vacuum nearly everywhere.
This is overwhelming evidence that this sort of brane to brane, cosmos to cosmos transition does NOT happen in a universe in which the cosmi are equidistant and randomly organized. The only way that those transitions are possible at all is if there is a metric in the higher dimensional universe and if neighboring cosmi have ALMOST identical mass distributions and if transitions are only likely as pair exchanges between neighboring cosmi (note the requirement for pair exchanges is also a rather hard one or else one would observe a cumulative violation of conservation of mass in random-walk style that would be impossible to miss and that people have looked for, unless the transitions were VERY unlikely, or became very unlikely as a function of the intercosmos metric separation to increasingly different cosmi.
Note well that these constraints mean that no matter what, they aren't going to "bypass" a shield with a neutron flux, because there are going to be no nearby cosmi/branes in which the shield does not exist.
Note well in addition the response to those who suggest that this might be a way of viewing tunnelling. It is indeed -- the alternative cosmi are one of the POSSIBLE (I don't say plausible) interpretations of path integral formulations of quantum mechanics, integrated out. But in this case you STILL won't get tunneling through a barrier centimeters thick.
So this is a pointless experiment. One might as well just look for egregious violations of mass-energy conservation in everyday experiments, because if there is any substantive probability of mass energy departing our own spacetime cosmos and appearing in another "nearby" one, it would happen all the time and all mass concentrations would diffuse out into a multicosmo heat death.
Gravitation is an excellent possibility as the coupling between branes/cosmi -- one would guess that the "dimpling" of one spacetime dimples all of the neighboring ones on all sides (however many "sides" there are:-). The dimples probably don't have to precisely correspond, but they are likely to have to approximately correspond to minimize almost any sort of coupling across the sheets that permits a transition to occur in the first place.
rgb
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
So every time I see one of these stories, I'm forced to ask ... is there any evidence to suggest this is real?
Or is this just one of those wacky theories physicists come up with and then try to find evidence for?
At this level, you average person can't tell the difference between bullshit and actual science -- though, I'm afraid calling it a "brane" makes me think more the former than the latter.
It gives me a brane cramp. :-P
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Well, if stuff can leak in ( particles ) what about the things like gravity, and photons - electric/magnetic fields?
Does Dark Matter suddenly have a possibility of a chance of a real explanation?
Tune in next week when Lassie finds the dog Brane!
Neutrons have a half-life of what - 11 minutes?
The other side ( trademarked ) will have to have a neutron source really close to the point of penetration.
And why discriminate? Photons, anyone? Neutrinos?
I think the proximity of a source on our side will increase the chances of neutrons going there,
with a few, maybe, meandering back to our side ( thermal neutrons, energetic ones will zip away )....
And to meander back, there has to be a moderating/reflection medium around the point of penetration....
Measuring how many 'DISAPPEAR" into the other Brane will be difficult, I think...
Much easier to measure things appearing on our side, unless the "best conditions" for things coming across
are like - a stellar-core environment, or a black hole event horizon nearby....
Besides, I now have a hankering for a banana split - later!
I don't know if neutrons are leaking, but I think I know where all my lost socks have gone.
This is highly interesting
I'm thinking 'Branal Leakage'.
What's to make them think that if a neutron leaks into a parallel universe from the nuclear reactor that if/when it comes back into our Universe that it will show up within the shielded detector that's nearby? I get the whole 'spatial correlation' angle, but who's to say that neutron couldn't appear 100,000 light years away from this planet?
As for determining if a neutron has left, and returned, something along the line of entanglement might be used...
if there is and analogous effect like that for neutrons....
AND - we could send specifically entangled neutrons/photons/neutrinos into their universe to confuse their AlKeMiStS.... LOL
Gravity should be a stronger force than it is, it's seen as sharing this force between dimensions weakening it in ours.
A successful outcome of this experiment to me, would help prove my thinking that dark matter is in a different dimension. it's gravity affecting ours.
Apparently I'm not alone in this thinking as en.wikipedia.org had this listed as a theory, yet not one seemed as a very viable. I thought I had a great brain fart until finding it listed and very lightly at that.
The experiment seems to be based on the assumption that a particle leaving and returning our universe would be likely to enter closely to where it left - is this an inevitable part of brane theory, or could the particle come out somewhere else entirely?
"branes.. branes.. I need more branes..."
They set up the same experiment, but do NOT put the shield in place, so as to facilitate the discovery in our brane.
A universe where they are, through altruism, trying to help us out with no expectation of reward.
What a nice brane! Thanks guys!
... if that was true. Several experiments to determine the neutron flux falling with the inverse square law (for a point source) have been done so far. To my knowledge none of them suggested the neutron particles were "leaking" into other dimensions. String theorists, go look elsewhere.
These "other universes" are confined to the physicists' branes.
For one the particle would be subjected to two instantaneous changes in the curvature of space time one exit and return so it's behaviour could be measurably changed from what is expected if it had just transitioned across a single area of one universe, unless the universes have to be almost identical for the leak to be possible in the first place? Perhaps that is the catch, the probability of a leak is proportional to the similarity of the states of the two universes, and so there will be a range of particle behaviours from common and not changed to very rare and significantly changed depending on which U{n} pairs interacted.
[S] --------U{0}----->|------------U{n}------->|----------U{0}------->[D]
S = source, D = detector
But what is to stop the particle going walk-about though an infinite range of universes and never returning? This would mean that we should be able to detect a permanent loss of particles too, and the inverse particles appearing from nowhere.
There is also the problem of the gravitational ripples induced by a mass going out of existence and then returning in a different place, from the U{0} point of view, where are they?
d@3-e.net
That's where they go wrong. France is not connected to another universe.
If this leakage is really happening, it would seem to violate the law of conservation of matter and energy, at least as it could be observed in this universe. Once these neutrons "leak" out of our universe, they would no longer be "here." Even if the law is technically preserved because they are now in another universe, this is a really big pill to swallow.
usage of the words "theory" and "theories"
If you aren't interested in the nature of our universe, or the possible existence of other universes that might be able to interact with ours, that's fine, but lots of us don't feel the same way. Numerous important scientific advances have come from what initially looked like useless findings, so just because you don't know right now how this might be applied to future technologies that doesn't mean it is a dead end.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
If they *do* exist, they would not be "alternate universes." They would be parts of "the universe." They may be alternate pockets of space-time, or alternate branes, or whatever, but if they actually exist then they are automatically covered under the meaning of the word "universe."
I hate they way people abuse language. And I hate the way popular abuse makes the wrong meanings eventually become right meanings. It is a terrible disservice to semantics. And there is nothing I can do about it but rant.
If the public begins to grasp just how deep a mystery the universe really is I suspect emotional discomfort may be a common reaction. It is similar to letting people know that we are hurtling through space on a rock in unkown directions towards certain doom and that not only they are irrelevant but the entire story of mankind and all traces of our existance is temporary. They may already sort of know that but making it clear to them will certainly take the joy out of the BLT that they ordered for lunch. Or as Jack Nicholson said " You don't want to know the truth.' "You can't handle the truth.".
This kind of scientific experiments where we make a volume of space free of some influence[s] and then wait for some event to happen [like the neutrino thing] remind me of a joke from an old book called "Physicists are laughing". It was an article on the subject of "Methods for catching a lion".
The Heisenberg method was described roughly as "There is a non-zero probability that all elementary particles of the lion will simultaneously tunnel through space and the lion will end up in the cage. Build the cage and lock it. Sit outside and wait..."
Seriously, i've been an avid /. reader since the early 90's without registering an account. This is actually my first comment and the only thing i have to say is: Why the fuck are they displaying ad's about candy crush before the comment's section? Oh, the times have sure changes.
"...Now physicists are devising an experiment to look for this neutron leakage..."
See the James Blish book "A Clash of Cymbals"...
The plural form of cosmos is cosmoses, much like the plural of virus is viruses, adding i to a word doesn't make it a plural
Neutrinos ? great, lets what for the bombs to be found out. protect us all. Will my mithril armor help me? What about other projects currently going on, probably exploring same and more. oh this is more specific. Lots of weird things going on underground. Look at the squirrel of a large hadron collider playing pong with the invisibles. What does it all mean ? At least we can check mark another part of the list and move on.
I made an attempt to seagull my congressman at a rally, but due to circumstances I didn't hang around to be sure I was successful.
Does this mean the leakage across branes could have seagulled congressman in multiple universes?
I'm going to sleep happy tonight with that thought.
The dimples probably don't have to precisely correspond, but they are likely to have to approximately correspond to minimize almost any sort of coupling across the sheets that permits a transition to occur in the first place.
Like the way galaxies form in dark matter filaments...