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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.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
I guess you haven't been keeping up with physics lately, but this kind of thing has been seriously discussed for decades, and has gained a lot of momentum in the last 10 years or so. The only thing slowing down the development of the science of alternate universes is inability to make falsifiable predictions. While not finding neutrons we can't account for wouldn't disprove anything, finding them could be the biggest science news since the prediction of and then discovery of the Cosmic Microwave Background.
It's a weird world out there and the possibilities of what reality really consists of are getting weirder and weirder and yet more plausible at the same time.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
It's not entanglement. There's only one neutron. It sounds like a kind of quantum tunnelling, except across "universes." There are types of tunnelling where distance doesn't have the same effect you might expect, but there are other types where it does.
No. Basically brane theories posit that our universe is a 4-dimensional "membrane" in a higher-order metaverse (usually with at least 11 dimensions, or was it twelve? The minimum number at which the various QM constants emerge naturally), and that there are probably other 4-dimensional branes in the metaverse as well. They're one of the four main scientifically recognized classes of possible "parallel universes". Picture if you will many sheets of paper floating in a room, each sheet a universe, and if two sheets were close enough together particles could potentially jump back and forth between them.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
You've got it almost exactly, except for the bad attitude. We have theories that are experimentally more accurate than classical physics (relativity, quantum mechanics), but those theories are mathematically inconsistent, plagued by apparently arbitrary "magic numbers", and make some predictions that we see no evidence of: i.e. they create holes where we *know* our knowledge is incomplete, and even more where we reasonably *suspect* there's more to be known. So, we try to come up with new theories to plug those holes. But because the holes are very strange, the patches must be very strange as well, and the patches we've come up with make few or no testable predictions, or at least none testable with current technology. So we keep trying to come up with ever-more-outlandish scenarios where the "patches" predict the potential for different outcomes than the widely accepted, but known-broken, theories. Because until we find an experiment that decisively disagrees with the known-broken theories, how are we ever going to know if we're on the right track, or just inflating a donkey with combustion byproducts?
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.