Scientists are searching for a mirror universe
nbcnews.com
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If we take our three spacial dimensions, and add another time dimension, then we can do a reflection at t=0 and this will produce a mirror object of everything from t>0 at t<0. (Note that in three dimensions, if we perform a reflection it is the same as a rotation when we add a fourth dimension, meaning we can do this "mechanically" if that is worth anything to you.)
This universe at t<0 looks exactly the same as our universe at t>0, except that you switch chirality (or left and right if you will). Now my toy example does not have exotic matter (abundance) differences and also cannot comment at things at the speed of light. In that sense it is Euclidean or perhaps Newtonian.
But what is interesting is that this toy example gives us a concrete way to understand right and left. You can choose anything to call left and anything to call right. But the side at which your heart is of your body will be switched at t<0. Additionally, and this is the only part that I find important or useful, we have actually partitioned things now according to whether they internally define left and right in the usual way or in the opposite way. And finally, we can even now say that subatomic particles that decide to decay as matter or antimatter now self-identify themselves for us and their choice of chirality determines their position at either x > 0 or -x < 0.
EDIT: Disclaimer: I am a mathematician, not a physicist.
Their time backwards is our time forwards, but penguins at the south pole, polar bears at the north pole, and all the birds in every tropical jungle near the equator will watch the moon and the stars spin across the sky, as evolutionary eons pass.
If we pass through some kind of temporal lens, and at the zero crossing, we come to understand the other side is an equal but opposite negation of ourselves, a look into the temporal mirror still doesn’t unlock the future. We’ll only catch an alternative perspective of now, and we also can’t do much to treat the mirror like furniture. There’s only one arrow of time, and the reflection isn’t separate and distinct just as shadows are anymore separate and distinct from the objects that cast them.
This article speaks about mirror universe that exists in the same 3+1 dimensional space-time as ours. It's just that the two are transparent to each other. Only gravity ties them together.
What is an intuitive explanation of what being in a 3+0 spacetime would be like? Since there's no time, nothing can "happen"...
Imagine a 3D object squashed between two glass plates until it's a single plane. You can see everything without changing focus.
I see "We are here" and think...well, sorta, but if the graph were continuous we're at exactly (3.0,1.0) or so it seems.
The quality level here smacks of 1999 vintage Onion:
https://www.theonion.com/worlds-top-scientists-ponder-what-i...
Although, do free neutrons clump?
Then again, if the neutrons oscillate to "mirror" and then have a high probability of coming back, presumably an independent probability over time, that can't be dark matter either since it tunnels back on timeframes even humans consider short.
Anyhow, on the article's own terms, the connection to dark matter seems tenuous.
I liked Foundation because of the series aspect - it was a cool premise and it was good to have so many books cover it thoroughly. I did find the last bits that were just to tie it together with the Elijah Bailey stories to be boring.
This reminds me of the two-part episode in Season 4 of "Enterprise", "In a Mirror, Darkly", which was probably the best episode of the series, and definitely had the very best opening sequence and music of the show.
The definition of THE universe is: "all existing matter and space considered as a whole; the cosmos".
The assignment and communication of meaning is a fascinating topic/problem that affects pretty much everything we do, yet it's usually invisible or transparent to us most of the time.
Following the above concept, you could "split up" (conceptually) the world/universe into explicit complements and you'd have the universe and its mirror. And this is in fact a very old concept, very well illustrated by the yin and yang.
Therefore, by Occam's razor, we don't need another "mirror" universe to balance out this one.
For the cosmological implications of this fact, there's Lawrence Krauss's book "A Universe from Nothing", also "The Inflationary Universe" by Alan Guth, and Stephen Hawking touches on it in "A Brief History of Time."
Just as in the Casimir experiment it was demonstrated that opposed conductive plates are attracted with a force that results from the suppression of vacuum energy states between them, so must the decay of the neutron be modulated by the vacuum field.
If you contrive the storage system to suppress the vacuum energy to a greater extent, the field will interact less with free neutrons and they will live a little longer. Likewise, the more possible energy states, the shorter they live.
This effect is apparent because the free neutron is quite unstable and short-lived. It is readily affected by the particle-antiparticle pairs that are always popping into and out of existence in the vacuum.
Protons, which are very stable and last a long time, show the same effect, but you would be long dead by the time you observed it. So not a practical experiment.
Why does a radioactive element decay at a particular time? Why is it random? Why is Schroedinger's cat a superposition of alive/dead with no way of predicting which one until you observe it and collapse the wave equation?
The answer to all of these is the same. The background state of the universe is chaotic. It visibly affects things that are unstable, while not having much effect on things that are stable.
The faster something is moving, the more mass it has. The more mass, the less it is affected by the vacuum field. This is the mechanism of time dilation. Increased mass, decreased size, increased density, surrounded by mass, all of these contrive to suppress the interaction of the vacuum field with an object by limiting the possible states it can occupy.
The outcome looks to us like order, but it's not. Everything is randomness and chaos.
Newton's laws are approximations because they apply simple math to chaos. Likewise, general relativity is a geometric theory applied to a chaotic universe. It's a good approximation of what we see, but it's only an approximation. No geometric theory can explain something that is fundamentally chaotic.
There. Is. No. Meaning.
Sleep well!
There are a couple of neat effects that fall out of the (mem)brane hypothesis. For example, it offers a model for why gravity is seemingly so weak compared to the other forces: because a large part of it leaks out into neighboring universes. In that case, we'd have a handy explanation for dark matter as well: it's gravity that leaks in from neighboring universes. This would mean that stuff clumps together across universes. It could also be an auxiliary model for black hole formation in certain cases where we have yet to find out how some black holes could grow very quickly.
If we ever become a K3 civilization we could attempt to send a message across universes with gravity, or possibly even paint a symbol into the sky using large masses. Not we know how likely the other universes are to support life (probably not very).
It's not a well-defined scale anyway, since you could probably build a K3-equivalent civilization with only a few star systems using miniature black holes as reactors; conversely, you could easily be a galaxy-spanning civilization but only use a fraction of the total stellar output.
The concept of translating into another universe does seem like an appropriate achievement and next step after K3. Since another universe might have wildly different basic parameters, classical sci-fi portals and such are probably out of the question. You'd have to translate the information stored in the brain into something appropriate that could continue to perform roughly the same functions on the other side.
Or is the 'portal' mechanism triggered so rarely that we would probably never observe it happening naturally?
It seems that in the crucial part the article makes gross oversimplification. I would imagine storage impacts observed half-life.
We know that we can collect neutrons into a degenerate gas. But it probably all tends to sink toward the center of the earth, like subatomic bouncy balls.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutronium
It’s still theoretical though. We haven’t bottled it for sale yet. It would probably have lots of interesting applications, not the least of which would include weaponization.
It's kind of an interesting thought experiment to try to put yourself in the mindset of a people before the discovery of something and trying to imagine how you would have perceived the world and if you yourself might have conceived of such notions. For instance the idea that all objects fall at the same rate of speed is something that's oddly enough an extremely recent discovery. The tale of the apple falling on Newton's head dates to but 350 years ago. We, of today, are separated by then by little more than about 4 lifetimes.
It feels at times that science progresses through 1% genius and 99% creativity. Newton's gravity is, relative to the times, no more simple or complex than Einstein's gravity and undoubtedly whatever we may eventually find to be the source of dark matter. The tricky part is that the universe has this habit of requiring us to cast aside what we think we know and look towards paths that seem insane. A feather falls at the same rate of speed as a bowling ball? Time itself can move differently for people in the same location based upon their relative velocities? Physical distances can literally contract or expand again for people in the same location and again based on their relative velocities? Objects themselves can bend what seems to be emptiness and, in turn, bend light itself (to say nothing of also having an impact on time)? These ideas are mostly so difficult to develop not because of mathematical or technical problems, but because they sound insane. It's really quite a blessing for the inquisitive and creative that we seem to live in a universe that prides itself in as being as defiant of intuition as it possibly can.
It would have to be taught in high scholl, and even then not everyone have a complete high school knowledge. People don't generally know Newtonian mechanics unless they are physics undergrads or graduates. You need calculus to get it.
I would argue that Newton's theory was more complex because it required new math. Einstein didn't. The math was already there, and he managed to incept his idea without it. Riemannian geometry just simplified description. It's similar to Maxwell. He had electromagnetism in over 20 equations, then some lad whose name I forgot, made work and closed it down to four, that again 99 percent or more people don't know, though they govern nearly everything at our scale. Touch, vision and chemistry is described by them. I can come with only two things that are part of everyday life, that lie outside. Gravity, in the part that makes us stick to the planet, and atomic energy, though that's fast trasformed back to EM domain. Everything else seems to be far away, except for the fact they make things stable, but we don't harness it.
To me ingenuity and creativity are essentially the same. It's the abilty to have those insane ideas, perhaps genius is to pick important ones to ponder upon. I think we agree, that scientific breakthroughs seem to be based on making up grander picture, where what you physically see is some kind of special case of generally opposite rules. One of the greatest example is the idea that movement is generally self sustained, seems crazy here in the atmosphere, where the 1st theories said, that it requires force and work to keep going. Something we all experience.
Well, that's a long tought-chain. Hope someone's find it interesting.
Quantum mechanics required the weirdness of the blackbody radiation spectrum to spring to life. The special theory of relativity is based on the observation that the Maxwell equations are not Galileo invariant and the results of their strange Lorentz invariance can be observed. The general theory of relativity is baed on the realization that despite efforts to measure a difference, inertial mass and gravitational mass always have the same value.
It took time for these things to become measurable and to make people go "hmmm..." and think about nature in new ways. The answers are creative and genial, but they required starting points. And creating those takes time.
As I understand it, this mirror world would be colder than our own and this would affect nucleosynthesis in the early universe. There would be significantly more helium and less heavier particles. Because the mirror universe is connected to our universe trough gravity, we would definitely notice is dark matter stars and planets would go buy. Our universe would have more dense points of matter and the mirror universe would have more light gas clouds circling roughly at the same area as galaxies in our world.
Here is a paper from 2000 "The Early Mirror Universe: Inflation, Baryogenesis, Nucleosynthesis and Dark Matter" https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/0008105