Physicists Hunt for Mirror Universe to Explain Neutron Decay Mystery & Dark Matt

Started by Unbeliever, July 08, 2019, 02:29:34 PM

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Unbeliever

God Not Found
"There is a sucker born-again every minute." - C. Spellman

Sal1981

I'm skeptical, but we'll see if the experiment will see a discrepancy between the neutrons fired and the detected neutrons.

Also, there might also be less than a novel explanation, if the case may be, for the missing neutrons; than if the experiments points to the existence of a mirror universe. Experiment will tell!

Unbeliever

I've heard of the hypothesis that the dark matter might be from gravity leaking into out universe from another, but I didn't expect there to be any experiment that could decide the question. I hope we can get an update when the experiment is done!
God Not Found
"There is a sucker born-again every minute." - C. Spellman

josephpalazzo

There's a greater chance that God exists than the parallel universe. There's nothing wrong with an episode or two in Star Trek using the parallel universe to weave a story but when a physicist does it to get a sensational headline in a magazine, it's a sad comment on physics, science and tax payers' money. This thread has ruined my day. 

Unbeliever

It may not exist, but if no one looks we'll never know for sure. People used to think that rocks could never fall from the sky, but they were shown the error of that thinking, by observation.
God Not Found
"There is a sucker born-again every minute." - C. Spellman

Hydra009

Quote from: josephpalazzo on July 08, 2019, 08:15:58 PM
There's a greater chance that God exists than the parallel universe. There's nothing wrong with an episode or two in Star Trek using the parallel universe to weave a story but when a physicist does it to get a sensational headline in a magazine, it's a sad comment on physics, science and tax payers' money. This thread has ruined my day.
Meh, it gets people's attention and interested in science.  I've seen a lot of worse things in the news cycle.

Draconic Aiur


Baruch

I thought that understanding neutrons, was a done deal per Standard Theory?

Parallel universes is unlikely for empirical verification.  Part of the multiverse bollocks in QFT interpretation ...

For example we have a Taylor expansion of some fancy function.  It has an infinity of terms that hopefully converge.

Is each term in the Taylor expansion, a separate "law" in a separate universe (C0 universe, C1 universe etc), with the sum of the infinite series ...
a "path integral"?  Isn't this a problem of "Pythagoran Realism"?  The notion that maths not only is a useful ...
quantitive model for physical processes, but that maths is what it actually is?

If you have multiple universes that have the same laws in each universe, you simply have duplication.  If you have separate laws in separate universes, then if they are really separate, then again the other universes don't matter.  Only if they laws are different, and the universes aren't really separate, do you have an interesting claim.

But if the multiple universes interact, and they have different laws, how can scientific method proceed?  Different space-time zones will have different phenomena depending on how the different universes interact differently.  This violates the fundamental notion of uniformitarianism (laws are for all space/all time).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-JqHo4-W4k ... sequence, series, convergence, divergence ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a58otkmkHtk ... adding a variable to a converging series (converges for some values of X).  Generalizing geometric series ...

Famously, a fancy function can be represented by a trigonometric series (cosines, sines), not just a power series (Taylor's Series is how we can define cosine, sine etc).

Solutions to QFT equations famously converge slowly (even after renormalization).  So it is hard to calculate.  Now imagine a graphical way of doing this ... Feynman diagrams.  Each Feynman diagram represents one term in a slowly converging series.  "Path Integral" is is simply an alternative way to add up the terms.  In this case, we are seeing a single universe that is calculated by adding up an infinity of terms that don't have their own reality.

But if the terms don't interact linearly (just simple addition) we have a new problem.  This is like having multiple universes (each term) interacting with each other.  An example of violating uniformitarianism ... wormholes.  A wormhole within one universe is interesting.  That means the topology (knots) of space-time vary from place/time to place/time.  Interacting multiple universes would be like ... a wormhole between two different universes.  But then are they different universes?  Only if they laws on one side are different on the other.
Ha’át’íísh baa naniná?
Azee’ Å,a’ish nanídį́į́h?
Táadoo ánít’iní.
What are you doing?
Are you taking any medications?
Don't do that.

josephpalazzo

Quote from: Hydra009 on July 08, 2019, 10:52:22 PM
Meh, it gets people's attention and interested in science.  I've seen a lot of worse things in the news cycle.

A casual search on the respectful arxiv.com yields this paper by Leah Broussard et al. (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1812.08258.pdf) on neutron decay. Just a standard test to search for beyond SM physics, no mentioned of a parallel world. So I'm wondering if that youtube video is just smoke and mirror (no pun intended).

Sal1981

On a tangential issue, I've read somewhere that there's supposed to be proton decay, but since it takes more than 14 billion years for it to happen that it's never been observed. Doesn't that mean we have to wait another 200-300 million years for the first to decay since the universe is 13.7 billion years old?

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josephpalazzo

Quote from: Sal1981 on July 09, 2019, 08:04:28 AM
On a tangential issue, I've read somewhere that there's supposed to be proton decay, but since it takes more than 14 billion years for it to happen that it's never been observed. Doesn't that mean we have to wait another 200-300 million years for the first to decay since the universe is 13.7 billion years old?

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You compensate by observing a very large bath of protons (water contains hydrogen, which contains protons). You look for proton decay via the main channel of neutral pions and positrons. The Japanese facility (Super-Kamiokande) contains 1033 protons, was observed for 12 years, and no trace of that decay was detected. So 1034 years was established as lower bound for proton decay.

Baruch

Proton decay was predicted by some GUT (Grand Unified Theory) ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Unified_Theory

Separate hypothetical domain from supersymmetry, supergravity, superstrings.  Proton decay and magnetic monopoles were the principle experiments.  A magnetic monopole has been observed, once.  If protons decay, they are very very shy.
Ha’át’íísh baa naniná?
Azee’ Å,a’ish nanídį́į́h?
Táadoo ánít’iní.
What are you doing?
Are you taking any medications?
Don't do that.

Sal1981

Quote from: josephpalazzo on July 09, 2019, 09:59:14 AM
You compensate by observing a very large bath of protons (water contains hydrogen, which contains protons). You look for proton decay via the main channel of neutral pions and positrons. The Japanese facility (Super-Kamiokande) contains 1033 protons, was observed for 12 years, and no trace of that decay was detected. So 1034 years was established as lower bound for proton decay.
Well, that conclusion seems flawed.

I'm probably talking out my ass, but if you looked at a million different clocks, and they all started at the same time at midnight, and you only waited for 11 hours, and somehow, expected some of them to strike at noon, you wouldn't see any of them strike at noon.

A similar contention could be had about red dwarfs, since they last for trillion of years, and comparatively, the universe is so young, no red dwarf has exhausted its fuel and died out yet.

Of course, nothing of this is analogous to the quantum realm, what am I missing? Is the proton decay analogous to radioactive decay of a radioactive isotope? I don't know enough about particle physics to know the difference between the two.

josephpalazzo

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Quote from: Sal1981 on July 09, 2019, 10:56:43 AM[size=0pt][/size][size=0pt][/color]


Of course, nothing of this is analogous to the quantum realm, what am I missing? Is the proton decay analogous to radioactive decay of a radioactive isotope? I don't know enough about particle physics to know the difference between the two.
[/size]

What you are missing is that QM is a probability theory. And yes, proton decay is analogous to radioactive decay of a radioactive isotope. So in the SK experiment, they were looking at 1033 protons over 10 years (actually 12 yrs). No decay, so the lower bound is 1033x 10 = 1034.To extend that lower bound, you would need to observer 100 years (1033x 102). Think of the cost (salaries for at least two generations of scientists, vacation, beach house, one or two mistresses for some, :-() and you can see that a little extension of that experiment could run in the hundreds of millions of USD. [/size]So the theory is about probability and half-life. Suppose the decay rate of a proton would be a half-life of [/size]ONE[/size] day. Observing two protons would mean one of them would decay over a period of ONE day. So for fossils, one looks at a particular atoms (carbon-14 in most cases). Estimate how much percentage wise these atoms have decayed into nitrogen-14, and for there, you can calculate how old is the fossil.

Unbeliever

Could the 10 second difference in neutron decay have anything to do with the difference in motion of the respective cases? It seems like someone would've ruled that out already though, so I guess not.
God Not Found
"There is a sucker born-again every minute." - C. Spellman