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If the "mirrorverse" exists, upcoming experiments involving subatomic particles could reveal it.At Oak Ridge National Laboratory in eastern Tennessee, physicist Leah Broussard is trying to open a portal to a parallel universe.
She calls it an "oscillation" that would lead her to "mirror matter," but the idea is fundamentally the same. In a series of experiments she plans to run at Oak Ridge this summer, Broussard will
send a beam of subatomic particles down a 50-foot tunnel, past a powerful magnet and into an impenetrable wall. If the setup is just right — and if the universe cooperates —
some of those particles will transform into mirror-image versions of themselves, allowing them to tunnel right through the wall. And if that happens, Broussard will have uncovered the first evidence of a mirror world right alongside our own.
"It's pretty wacky," Broussard says of her mind-bending exploration.
The mirror world, assuming it exists, would have its own laws of mirror-physics and its own mirror-history. You wouldn't find a mirror version of yourself there (and no evil Spock with a goatee — sorry "Star Trek" fans). But current theory allows that you might find mirror atoms and mirror rocks, maybe even mirror planets and stars. Collectively, they could form an entire shadow world, just as real as our own but almost completely cut off from us.
© Genevieve Martin/Oak Ridge National Laboratory/U.S. Dept. of EnergyLeah Broussard studies subatomic particles at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where she will be searching for mirror matter this summer.
Broussard says her initial search for the mirror world won't be especially difficult. "This is a pretty straightforward experiment that we cobbled together with parts we found lying around, using equipment and resources we already had available at Oak Ridge," she says. But if she unequivocally detects even a single mirror particle, it would prove that the visible universe is only half of what is out there — and that the known laws of physics are only half of a much broader set of rules.
"If you discover something new like that, the game totally changes," Broussard says.
Ten seconds that rocked physicsAs with many grand scientific quests, the hunt for mirror matter
grew out of a small, seemingly esoteric mystery. Starting in the 1990s, physicists developed high-precision experiments to study how neutrons — particles found in the nuclei of atoms — break down into protons, a process related to radioactivity. But those experiments took a strange turn.
Researchers found that neutrons created in particle beams, similar to the one Broussard will use, last 14 minutes and 48 seconds, on average, before "decaying" into protons. But neutrons stored in a laboratory bottle seem to break down a bit faster, in 14 minutes and 38 seconds.
Ten seconds might not sound like much, but the actual difference should be zero: All neutrons are exactly the same, and their behavior should depend not one bit on where or how they are examined.
"I take discrepancy very seriously," says Benjamin Grinstein, a particle-physics expert at the University of California, San Diego. "It's not just between two experiments. It is a collection of many experiments done independently by several groups. The newest experiments, conceived in part to resolve the disagreement,
have "only made it worse," he adds.
Grinstein has explored the possibility that some neutrons are unexpectedly breaking down into particles other than protons but has found nothing so far. Mirror matter offers a more elegant, if somewhat bizarre, explanation.
A decade ago, Anatoli Serebrov of Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute in Russia introduced the idea that ordinary neutrons sometimes cross over into the mirror world and transform into mirror neutrons. At that point, we could no longer detect them —
it would be as if some of the neutrons simply vanished. "That would make the neutron lifetime look wrong," Broussard explains, because some of the neutrons would have been disappearing from the test equipment while the researchers were studying them.
Connect the dots, and you reach a far-out conclusion:
The neutron experiments might look screwy because physicists unwittingly opened a portal to the mirror world.Through the looking glassBroussard's goal is to find out if that portal really exists and, if so, to open it in a methodical way. That's where her neutron beam and impenetrable wall come in.
Oak Ridge has an 85-megawatt
nuclear reactor that can shoot out billions of neutrons on demand, so getting enough raw material to work with isn't an issue. The hard part is figuring out how to make some of the neutrons cross over into the mirror world, and then prove to her skeptical colleagues (and to her skeptical self) that it really happened.
Running the experiment will take about one day. Collecting the data and weeding out every possible source of error might then take a few weeks more. Broussard is looking for any telltale neutrons that managed to get past the barrier by turning into mirror neutrons, then turning back. "It all comes down to: Are we able to shine neutrons through a wall?" she says. "We should see no neutrons" according to conventional physics theory. If some of them show up anyway, that would suggest that conventional physics is wrong, and the mirror world is real.
Meanwhile,
Klaus Kirch is working on a complementary experiment at the Paul Scherrer Institute in Zurich. His plan is to capture slow-moving neutrons, hit them with a magnetic field and then count to see if all the particles are still there. "If some neutrons oscillated into mirror-neutrons, they would disappear from our apparatus," he says. Kirch's team has already run the experiment and hopes to have their results analyzed later in the summer.
Life on the far sideDespite their conceptual simplicity, both Broussard's and Kirch's experiments are extremely delicate undertakings, dependent on assessing the strange behavior of a few subatomic particles within a crowd of billions. Other researchers have proposed that there might be more blatant signs of a mirror world. We might be seeing it everywhere in the sky.
Since the 1970s, astronomers have deduced that
the universe is packed full of "dark matter," a substance that cannot be observed directly but whose powerful gravitational pull helps keep galaxies from flying apart. The latest analyses indicate that
dark matter outweighs visible matter by a factor of five. Yet dozens of intensive searches by astronomers around the world have failed to identify what dark matter is made of.
Zurab Berezhiani, a physicist at the University of L'Aquila in Italy who has conducted his own
mirror neutron searches, offers an intriguing explanation: Dark matter has been hard to find because it is hidden away in the mirror world. In this view, dark matter and mirror matter are one and the same. If so, the mirror world is not just ubiquitous, it is far more massive than our own. At a recent physics conference, Berezhiani
expanded on the idea, outlining a possible parallel reality full of mirror stars, mirror galaxies and mirror black holes. Maybe even dark life?
"Dark people is probably a bit farfetched," says Broussard, who confesses that these ideas push her right to the edge of her comfort zone.
"But dark matter is very likely as rich as our own matter. This kind of thing needs to be explored."If she can open a passage to the mirror world at Oak Ridge, that will be one heck of a start.
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In 1978, a jazz musician named Wali Ford purchased 200 acres of land in the Pine Barrens, near Ong’s Hat, and set up an ashram there called the Moorish Science Ashram. It was for seekers interested in studying spirituality, radical politics, tantra, psychopharmacology, and other counterculture interests. A couple of former Princeton scientists ended up there, and other oddball researchers soon followed. They founded the Institute for Chaos Studies at the ashram, full of people who were interested in exploring hard science using esoteric, spiritual tools.
By the late ’80s they developed a device called The Egg to explore something called “cognitive chaos.” It was a kind of modified sensory deprivation chamber. They were hoping it would help them determine the point at which a wave becomes a particle. But during a test of The Egg, with a young man inside of it, the whole thing just disappeared. Seven minutes later, it came back, and the young man, who was still alive, told them what had happened: He had dived down to the quantum level and followed a wave all the way into an alternate dimension, into another version of Earth. This other Earth is geologically similar to our own, thick with forest, but with no trace of human life. Over the next few years, the scientists moved their operation over to this alternate Earth, leaving behind only a secret laboratory where The Egg occasionally returns with its passengers to restock supplies.
A strange tale indeed.
kind ofsuper creepy, and a big part of that is the story's verisimilitude along with the truism that truth is truly often stranger than fiction.For me, I am reminded of an old made-for-tv-movie? from the 1970s? where NASA discovers that there's an identical planet to earth (except maybe it was a mirror (reversed) image world - which is always hidden from view because its 24/7 eclipsed by the Sun.
(spoiler alert) So we send our Astronaut(s?) there and he/they gets back way quicker than expected . .
It turns out that the other earth is identical and each had launched identical rockets to the other Earth
Does anyone remember that? The name of it?
R.C.
Around 1995? I once met my absolute Doppelgänger in Reno NV when I was en route to ski at Tahoe. It was beyond strange. I went into a Big Box store and the entire time, employees were saying to me: "Mike, what are you doing back here shopping? You're supposed to be up front, fixing the slot machines! NO ONE BELIEVED ME when I said "Sorry, I'm not 'Michael'. They thought he was joking with them.
Also, quite apparently everyone really liked the guy. "Hey, Mike! How ya been?" It got to the point that I stopped denying I was him, as it was impossible to convince ANYONE that I wasn't him. I believe I had to show my drivers' license to the cashier to prove that I was, moi, R.C., and NOT "Michael' nor "Mike."
As I walked out I was still getting grief for not having fixed the slot machine(s). Then, approaching my car, appeared in front of me the frankly most handsome and studly looking gent I've ever met. (Joking.) We both stopped; and I said "Hi. I'm R.C., and you've gotta be Michael and are here to fix the slot machines." It still floors me even now. Him too, I'm sure. SO WEIRD.
R.C.
Do I believe it, I remain open.
But consciousness and reality is the big thing in science today.
PDF archived, Ongs Hat the Beginning, many books referencing consciousness and quantum physics.
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The thing that strikes me from this text, is that many reputably acknowledged researchers and physicists, way back decades ago were discussing consciousness and the reality of the world in which we live in today.
I think the story as presented, reminds me of the language of Alchemy, to confuse and send the searcher down the rabbit hole.
Just my thoughts.