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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. . . .
...in the creation of transparent Aluminum....
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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.
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?
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.
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.
Except that the baseline expectation is derived from experience with previous, presumably brane-leaky, shielding.
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
The proposed experiment does not require an other-dimensional intelligence conducting an identical experiment, jut another universe. The neutrons would leak out of our universe and then back in, untouched.
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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.
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