Neutrons propelled into other universes!

[tuftears]

Apparently you may be able to zap neutrons into another universe... This is relevant to Avatars because, as our characters have discovered, the story hinges on virtual realities being somehow windows into other universes... Thus the appearance of creatures from those other universes, or the disappearance of people from this universe into those worlds. The above is less promising than the headline sounds, unfortunately, since you basically have a very, very low chance for any individual neutron to get propelled into another universe, and even if you got one over the wire, well, it's a neutron, what can you do with it? But still... What if you really did have the chance to step into an alternate universe? Wouldn't you be curious enough to peek?

Comments

[shockwave77598.livejournal.com]

How do you trap a neutron for a year, when the halflife of a free neutron is a little over 10 minutes?!

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

Pair it up with a nice proton and electron?

[ben-mouse.livejournal.com]

Accelerate it as close as you can to the speed of light! That way, while the neutron -thinks- it's lasting its required 10 minutes, to another observer it's lasting far longer!

[traveller-blues.livejournal.com]

You sign it up for a cellphone contract and send it over the event Verizon.

But seriously... they've learned how to Jimmy a Neutron? :D

-Trav

[ben-mouse.livejournal.com]

I think we do peek into alternative universes. atoms are bound to a quantum reality, and brains are ultimately made of of atoms! I have to wonder if our dreams aren't echos of other universes, carried to us by spooky action.

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

I'd be moderately skeptical of that view-- I'm far more inclined toward them being subconscious echoes of things in our mind, especially things like houses of infinite stairs, or being naked in English class.

But I do make use of that view of things in Avatars-- that there is something unique about the human mind which allows it to bring order out of quantum chaos!

[wordslinger.livejournal.com]

I agree with you there, with one corollary: this works only for those who live in liminal space, between the real worlds and the glittering energy of the Net. I like to think that some of the echoes of what I've done will live out there -- and that echoes of the ancient Egyptians and others still live out there.

I am, however, a closet romantic.

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

Good word regards 'liminal space'-- wish I'd been aware of it before, I might have adjusted how I'd described some things in the Avatars 2.0 campaign. ^_^

[ben-mouse.livejournal.com]

Of course, in a multiverse of infinite universes, there's one where you ARE naked in English class.

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

You can always go back and retcon the logs. ;D

[cjthomas.livejournal.com]

Penrose argued something like this for quite a while (that the brain did quantum processing based on microtubule structures). Long story short, most scientists are pretty sure it's bunk.

I touched on this a bit in one of my FC presentations. Quantum entanglement only lasts in the absence of interaction. Interaction - especially with thermal systems - causes "decoherence" (the modern understanding of what used to be called "wavefunction collapse").

The brain's components are strongly coupled to each other. The bath of thermal noise from these interactions collapses any quantum state almost instantly - in a vastly shorter timeframe than that of information processing within the brain.

The brain is marvellous enough as a classical device, without having to ascribe quantum magic to it :).

[cjthomas.livejournal.com]

Before anyone gets too excited...

This paper isn't saying that neutrons tunnel into other universes.

It's saying that _if_ certain speculative assumptions about the universe are correct, neutrons _might_ tunnel between universes, but that observations _rule out_ more than a certain very low rate of tunnelling, which constrains what speculative assumptions you can and cannot make while remaining consistent with those observations.

This sort of paper is written all the time; it's one of the mainstays of theoretical to physics. Imagine something wierd or nifty, and figure out the versions that can and can't be _disproved_ based on existing observations. For bonus points, point out how future experiments could disprove (or prove!) an even wider range of hypotheses.

The fact that it's published on Arxiv is a great big hint that nobody's even looking for this at present. Arxiv is a preprint server: a place where scientists, reputable and non-reputable, circulate drafts that might or might not someday be in good enough shape to publish.

So, a nifty idea, and less far out that many of the others I've seen ("braneworld cosmology" has actually been discussed in serious publications, speculative or not), but the article is _not_ saying that any such tunnelling has been actually _observed_.