An Experiment To Create A "Portal" To A Parallel Universe? Maybe!

 

                                        Parallel Earths separated by fractal dimensions

Ever since the airing of ‘The Man In The High Castle’ (based on Philip K. Dick’s superb scifi novel) about a parallel Earth in which the U.S. & Allies lost World War II,

 The idea of parallel universes has captivated the imagination of the public and physicists are no exception.  In my own blog post from September, 2011, 

• Are There Parallel Universes?

I examined the nature of parallel universes in some detail, including how the basic concept differed from Hugh Everett's 'Many Worlds' theory, and also how such parallel universes might be detected based on a simple experiment proposed by physicist David Deutsch.  Now, researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory are preparing an experiment to find out whether or not parallel universes exist - by attempting to open a particle-sized portal into one. 

Note that this is not the same as the generic, passive detection of one using a diffraction grating such as proposed by David Deutsch, e.g.

In this case the dark fringes are suggested (by Deutsch) as arising from "shadow photons" originating from a parallel universe.  By contrast, in the Oak Ridge experiment, according to NBC News, physicist Leah Broussard will fire a beam of neutrons through a 15m (50-foot)  tunnel. At the end of the tunnel, the particles will hit an impenetrable wall. A neutron detector will be set up on the other end of the wall.

If the setup is right, some of those particles will transform into mirror-image versions of themselves, passing through the wall. Then, according to the working hypothesis, if the neutron detector detects a neutron, it could prove the existence of a parallel dimension or universe.  How so?   Well, in order for the neutron to pass through the wall it has to oscillate into the mirror world-universe then back into our own.  Magnets on both sides of the wall will be set up to facilitate the oscillation.  While few (if any)  of the Oak Ridge physicists expect any neutron (based on a series of attempts)  to successfully make it into the parallel world, the bad odds are not a deal breaker.   If just one neutron does make it to the other side and back it will change the game and mark the first experiment ever accessing a parallel universe via a portal.

Such existence could answer many questions pertaining to our own universe such as why there is so little Lithium 7 isotope. (There is only about one third of that which should have been created in the Big Bang. )  It is enticing to speculate here that the missing amount could have been redirected into the mirror universe.

Dark matter-energy - to account for our universe's accelerating expansion - e.g.

 Might also be explained by being present in a mirror universe.  We haven't detected such dark mass-energy (at least not directly) because it is concentrated in the mirror universe but still has effects on our own.  The negative pressure that's associated with dark energy, p  =  - r /3, for example,  could then more easily account for the repulsive gravity that arises. ( Since any negative pressure has associated with it gravity that repels rather than attracts and we know the term  r + 3p acts as a source of gravity in general relativity .)

All this implies that creating a portal at the scale of a particle would be a monumental discovery. If such passage were successful it would be on the time scale of the elemental tau (ït ₁ ) and thereby explain why two such universes (or mirror worlds within them) could exist side by side yet be unaware of each other. The simplest explanation is that their internal and global times differ [1].

Two parallel universes out of phase by an elemental tau t ₁  (10^-43 s)

                                   ( Frequency would be separated by an amount 1ôt ₁)

In the preceding digression I adopted Finkelstein’s mode [2] whereby he actually created an operator ït ₁ >  explicitly to denote a smallest element of time.  I use the term tau (t) for these, based on the same unit from quantum set theory. According to this definition, 'one tau' is:[2]

10^-43 < τ < 10^-23

This is an extremely small time unit to be sure, but up to twenty orders of magnitude larger than the Planck time (10^-44 s). The tau, or variable tau, can then be thought of as a ‘building block’ or element of proper time and its generality enables its application in any parallel universe.

[1] Achong, A., 1984, Internal Time and Global Time, Proceedings of the 2nd Caribbean Physics Conference, Leo L. Mosely (Ed.)

[2] Finkelstein, D.: 1982, Quantum Sets and Clifford Algebras, in International Journal of Theoretical Physics, Vol. 21, Nos. 6/7, p. 489. (Reference to tau on p. 494).