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Escape from the universe
Posted on Friday, January 28, 2005 @ 20:05:47 GMT by vlad
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February 2005 | 107 » Cover story » Escape from the universe
The universe is destined to end. Before it does, could an advanced civilisation escape via a "wormhole" into a parallel universe? The idea seems like science fiction, but it is consistent with the laws of physics and biology. Here's how to do it
Michio Kaku
Here is a fragment from this fascinating article :
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...The WMAP satellite settled the long-standing question of the age of the universe: it is officially 13.7bn years old (to within 1 per cent accuracy). But more remarkably, the data showed that dark energy is not a fluke, but makes up 73 per cent of the matter and energy of the entire universe. To deepen the mystery, the data showed that 23 per cent of the universe consists of "dark matter," a bizarre form of matter which is invisible but still has weight. Hydrogen and helium make up 4 per cent, while the higher elements, you and I included, make up just 0.03 per cent. Dark energy and most of dark matter do not consist of atoms, which means that, contrary to what the ancient Greeks believed and what is taught in every chemistry course, most of the universe is not made of atoms at all...
Create negative energy
If Kerr rings prove to be too unstable or lethal, one might also contemplate opening up wormholes via negative matter/energy. In 1988, Kip Thorne and his colleagues at the California Institute of Technology showed that if one had enough negative matter or negative energy, one could use it to create a transversable wormhole—one in which you could pass freely back and forth between your lab and a distant point in space (and even time). Negative matter/energy would be sufficient to keep the throat of the wormhole open for travel.
Unfortunately, no one has ever seen negative matter. In principle, it should weigh less than nothing and fall up, rather than down. If it existed when the earth was created, it would have been repelled by the earth's gravity and drifted off into space.
Negative energy, however, has been seen in the laboratory in the form of the Casimir effect. Normally, the force between two uncharged parallel plates should be zero. But if quantum fluctuations outside the plates are greater than the fluctuations between the plates, a net compression force will be created. The fluctuations pushing the plates from the outside are larger than the fluctuations pushing out from within the plates, so these uncharged plates are attracted to each other.
This was first predicted in 1948 and measured in 1958. However, the Casimir energy is tiny—proportional to the inverse fourth power of the separation of the plates. To make use of the Casimir effect would require advanced technology to squeeze these parallel plates to very small separations. If one were to reshape these parallel plates into a sphere with a double lining, and use vast amounts of energy to press these spherical plates together, enough negative energy might be generated for the interior of the sphere to separate from the rest of the universe.
Another source of negative energy is laser beams. Pulses of laser energy contain "squeezed states," which contain negative as well as positive energy. The problem is separating the negative from the positive energy within the beam. Although this is theoretically possible, it is exceedingly difficult. If a sophisticated civilisation could do this, then powerful laser beams might generate enough negative energy for the sphere to peel from our universe.
Even black holes have negative energy surrounding them, near their event horizons. In principle, this may yield vast quantities of negative energy. However, the technical problems of extracting negative energy so close to a black hole are extremely tricky.
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Read the whole text at: Prospect Magazine
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Re: Escape from the universe (Score: 1)
by bender772 on Sunday, January 30, 2005 @ 05:47:18 GMT
(User Info | Send a Message) http://www.suppressedscience.net | Complete BS. The The WMAP neither proved that the age of the universe is 13.7 billion years, nor that "dark energy" accounts for 73 per cent of the mass/energy in the universe.
What it did is produce data that leads to these two estimates based on the assumption that the big bang theory is correct. But there is a lot of evidence that says that it isn't. A brief summary of it can be found at
http://www.cosmologystatement.org/
"Dark Energy" is not a fact, it's just the latest ad-hoc hypothesis introduced to safe the big bang theory and its proponents from having to admit that the theory is in trouble, because observation keeps contradicting it. Van Flandern wrote on this subject in "The Top 30 Problems with the Big Bang"
"The Big Bang (..) no longer makes testable predictions wherein proponents agree that a failure would falsify the hypothesis. Instead, the theory is continually amended to account for all new, unexpected discoveries. Indeed, many young scientists now think of this as a normal process in science! They forget, or were never taught, that a model has value only when it can predict new things that differentiate the model from chance and from other models before the new things are discovered. Explanations of new things are supposed to flow from the basic theory itself with, at most, an adjustable parameter or two, and not from add-on bits of new theory. (..) Perhaps never in the history of science has so much quality evidence accumulated against a model so widely accepted within a field. Even the most basic elements of the theory, the expansion of the universe and the fireball remnant radiation, remain interpretations with credible alternative explanations. One must wonder why, in this circumstance, four good alternative models are not even being comparatively discussed by most astronomers." |
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Re: Escape from the universe (Score: 1)
by ElectroDynaCat on Sunday, January 30, 2005 @ 11:45:37 GMT
(User Info | Send a Message) | Not enough experimental or observational data exists to put the first supposition of this thesis on solid ground.
The jury is still out about the future of the Universe, or even what or if the Universe can really be defined. We are still at the Earth centered stage of our concepts.
The Big Bang Theory is for popular consumption, a remodeled Creationist analog for the general culture designed not to offend religious sensibilties.
In fact, we haven't got a clue. |
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Cosmic oddity casts doubt on theory of universe (Score: 1)
by vlad on Sunday, January 30, 2005 @ 12:44:14 GMT
(User Info | Send a Message) http://www.zpenergy.com | From: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20050129/BANG29
Cosmic oddity casts doubt on theory of universe
By DAN FALK
Saturday, January 29, 2005 - Page F8
A new analysis of the "echo" of the Big Bang has left cosmologists scratching their heads and could throw a monkey wrench into efforts to understand how the universe began.
U.S. and European scientists analyzed the distribution of "hot" and "cold" regions -- areas that are putting out greater or less amounts of energy than the average -- of the cosmic microwave background radiation (the so-called echo). What they found was unexpected: an apparent correlation between those hot and cold spots and the orientation and motion of our solar system.
"All of this is mysterious," says Glenn Starkman, a Canadian physicist based at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland and one of the authors of a recent paper in Physical Review Letters that outlined the finding. "And the strange thing is, the more you delve into it, the more mysteries you find."
The study, by Case Western scientists and the European Centre for Nuclear Research in Geneva, is based on data from the WMAP satellite, the NASA spacecraft that began mapping the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation in fine detail in 2001.
The observed correlation is troubling on several fronts.
First of all, there is no reason to believe that the finding reflects any physical connection between our local astronomical neighbourhood and the universe at large.
As Dr. Starkman puts it: "None of us believe that the universe knows about the solar system, or that the solar system knows about the universe."
Far more plausible, he says, is that something within our solar system is producing or absorbing microwaves. That means that anyone doing cosmology would have to take into account such "local" contamination.
(The correlation involves the largest-scale fluctuations of the CMB radiation. If some of those fluctuations are a local rather than a cosmological phenomenon, it would mean that the truly cosmological large-scale fluctuations are even less intense than previously thought.)
There is, however, another possibility: The patterns seen by Dr. Starkman and his colleagues might simply be a fluke -- an accidental alignment between the solar system and patterns in the CMB radiation.
If the correlation is real, however, it could cast doubt on the popular "inflation" model of the early universe. That model, which builds on the well-established Big Bang theory, says the universe underwent a period of incredibly rapid, exponential growth in the first split-second of its existence.
One of its predictions is that the universe should be nearly perfectly "smooth," that the CMB fluctuations should be equally intense at all scales.
An analogy with a musical instrument can be helpful: If you hit a drum, you hear many tones at the same time -- a primary tone as well as many overtones, or "harmonics." The inflation model predicts that all the overtones in the CMB should be equally intense, but instead "we're missing the bass," Dr. Starkman says. "And what bass there is seems to be not generated by the universe, but by something local."
Other physicists are responding with caution to the finding.
"There is no way to judge the real significance of such a result," says Charles Bennett of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., the leader of the WMAP team.
It all depends on how we perceive "chance," and how we evaluate probabilities, Dr. Bennett says. The alignments seen in the CMB may seem unlikely, he says, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they require new physics to explain them.
He points out that "improbable things happen frequently because there are lots of opportunities for them to occur." In other words, he says, the newly discovered CMB correlations are most likely the product of chance.
Dan Falk is a science journalist based in Toronto.
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