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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?
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. . . .
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/
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!
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The idea is to create so many they couldn't help to jump back and forth. To (hopefully) leak into another brane and (hopefully) leak back.
If they just sit in the middle of nowhere, it's a hope that an abnormally large source from another brane just happens to emit in that particular spot at the right time. In other words, beyond improbable.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
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."
Hear hear. Moreover, unless I'm mistaken, shielding is the sort of thing where, every once in a while, a neutron can manage to get through... right? Is this accounted for somehow, or is this not the case?
What ensures the detected neutron isn't just some other neutron?
would be even huger. Getting the neutrons will be the easy part :-)
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.
Doesn't anyone screen these submissions?!
#DeleteChrome
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.
What ensures the detected neutron isn't just some other neutron?
Be quiet, or they'll lose their funding! This project is just a front for funding their DeLorean time machine.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Not a single thing.
The idea would be to look for neutron counts higher than they should be getting given the amount of shielding. So if it should be blocking 99% but they are seeing 2%, then they would have a possible positive result. So they would be looking for statistically significant differences that could only be explained by neutrons skipping between universes.
Well, the idea is that leakage appears everywhere and some tiny percentage of neutrons are always slipping between branes. So if you have a high flux source a certain number of neutrons would leak in the space between the source and the shield and of those neutrons a certain amount would leak a second time from elsewhere back into our universe between the end of the shield and the detector.
No no no, in this case the problem is wasteful government spending on research that does not result in marketable consumer products.
Except that the baseline expectation is derived from experience with previous, presumably brane-leaky, shielding.
You're looking for quotes? See my journal.
Actually, I think physicists have speculated that gravity is the weakest force because some of it leaks out of our brane. Stands to reason that some would leak in from other branes to. Mutual attraction means matter clumps up "in the same place" on nearby branes. Dark matter is dark because only its gravitation leaks in; other forces and interactions are constrained to its own universe.
The amount of dark matter - or rather, the amount of gravitational energy leaking in - might tell us how many branes we are "adjacent to" in the bigger scheme of things.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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?
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.
You have to have the branes to figure it out yourself...
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Well, they derive how much the shielding should be blocking, so they can go back to fundamentals there.
It is possible that there are historical measurements that were recorded and examine those for possible differences, but ideally in order to run an experiment like this you would need to be taking specific measurements along with recording specific information about the reactor state and shielding involved, which may not have been done already.
Ideally they would be using their own, very carefully built shielding with carefully measured density and thickness (so the absorption can be calculated fresh) and be taking multiple measurements with known precisions from various points around the reactor: at least two, so you know what the flux is with and without your calibrated shield at specific points in the reactors time of operation. I really do not know if measurements have been done that would meet these criteria.
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.
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.
Well, they derive how much the shielding should be blocking, so they can go back to fundamentals there.
What fundamental laws that lack constants based on empirical measurements would they use?
The way you know how much radiation a 1" lead plate blocks is by passing radiation through a 1" lead plate. If you figure it out by looking up a figure in a reference book, it is only because somebody else did the measurement and put the constant in a book for you to look up.
Those experiments would have already accounted for leaking between branes. You'd need two complementary ways to do the measurement, with one of them susceptible to cross-brane communication and the other not.
This is highly interesting
Spitballing here, but the level of neutrons that get blocked by shielding is proportional to the amount of shielding, and the level of neutrons that tunnel out is some sigma of the density of the number of neutrons still travelling in the correct direction to hit the sensor, while the level of neutrons that tunnel back is not related to the amount of shielding at all, so measurements at different levels of shielding should create a solvable system of equations. Assuming there is no shielding present in the parallel universe.
Someone had to do it.
I think this is a solid indication that you have gone insane in the membrane.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Because it's consistent with all the stuff we know now that we didn't know 30 years ago. Look up inflation cosmology.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
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?
... I have so many coathangers. I don't remember buying most of them.
Mind blown.
Nothing is ever "perfect."
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
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.
Somehow I doubt the shielding is perfect. Assuming it's perfect is an awfully big assumption. I doubt that anyone is claiming that the shielding is perfect, it seems a more reasonable assumption but could be refuted with a quote, if you had one.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Good. I like when things are questioned. I read both Brian Greene and Lee Smolin.
Nonetheless, there are predictions that can be made based on current research, and it makes sense to try them out if there's a reasonable way to do it.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
I'm afraid calling it a "brane" makes me think more the former than the latter.
"Brane" is simply an abbreviation of "membrane" that indicates it has more than three dimensions.
Or is this just one of those wacky theories physicists come up with and then try to find evidence for?
All scientific theories are "wacky" until evidence is found, maths is not evidence but it is very often a good clue. The problem with things like cosmology and quantum mechanics is that it is unexplainable in any language other than math. The "average person" doesn't have the required fluency in math to even read it, let alone examine the consequences that flow from it. I have a math degree but this math is a very different dialect that I don't understand very well. Irony is that QM is the most accurately measured and tested theory we have, it's as close to certainty as any theory gets.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I think you people must be stealing my coathangers. I never have enough.
Alternately, maybe you don't have a wife, who constantly buys new clothes that need to be hung up.
You can calculate from first principles the probability that a neutron will manage to traverse a certain thickness of shielding of type X without colliding with a nucleus. It's all statistical distributions and quantum field equations after all. If your shielding is based on a regular crystalline lattice then you can refine your model even further.
We generally use empirical measurements for such things, but that's just because it's a lot easier to do the relevant experiments than run the extremely longwinded calculations. But if we take the time to do the calculations, and the results are substantially different than those from the experiment, then we've just found evidence of a flaw in our understanding of fundamental physics - the kind of thing that would make a researcher's career.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
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.
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.
And you're certain that none of those constants were derived in a way that taints their values with possible propagation through other universes? As far as I'm aware, none of the values of the constants of the standard model are predicted by any kind of theory.
Nothing to see here.
...in your comment.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
She's telling you in her way to get rid of those bell bottoms you wore back in the 60s, when they were cool.
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..."
Not completely, no. But you have to start somewhere.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Well said.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Exactly. This experiment is just that, an experiment. If it works, it will show evidence of something predicted by these multiverse theories based on inflation, and provides an interesting and important new data point. If it doesn't it doesn't disprove anything because it's still a guess.
There are so many weird and previously unexpected things that were predicted by theory and only then discovered: variations in orbits due to the curvature of spacetime (predicted by relativity and confirmed by studying the orbit of Mercury), the existence of neutrinos, the cosmic background radiation, a lot of other stuff from the Standard Model that I don't recall because I'm not an expert...
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.