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Science at OKC

Hunting light dark matter with gamma rays.

Large Hadron Collider (LHC) Could Detect Extra Dimensions.

A recent paper published in Physics Letters B has raised the prospect that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) could mark a discovery that would put its earlier achievements with the #HiggsBoson in the shade. The authors of the recent published paper propose it could spot mini black holes. Such a discovery would be a matter of massive importance on its own, but might be a sign of even more significant things. Few notions from theoretical physics capture the public imagination as much as the “many-worlds theory,” which suggests an infinite number of universes that vary from our own in ways large and small. The notion has delivered great fodder for science fiction novelists and comedians. Nevertheless, according to Professor Mir Faizal from the University of Waterloo, “Normally, when people think of the multiverse, they think of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, where every possibility is actualized,” he told Phys.org. “This cannot be tested and so it is philosophy and not science.” Nonetheless, Faizal reflects the test for a different type of parallel universes nearly within our reach. Faizal says “What we mean is real universes in extra dimensions. As gravity can flow out of our universe into the extra dimensions, such a model can be tested by the detection of mini black holes at the LHC.”

#ParticlePhysics #Extradimensions #LHC #CERN #TheoreticalPhysics #BlackHoles

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When Black Hole Firewalls pit theory of relativity against Quantum Mechanics.

A worldwide study reconciles the theory of black hole “firewalls,” which pits the two theories of general relativity and quantum mechanics against one another.

In the new, free-for-all era of dark matter research, the controversial idea that dark matter is concentrated in thin disks is being rescued from scientific oblivion.

A new research paper published in Physical Review Letters has brought forward a significant new understanding of general relativity laws, and has found some strange physics taking place inside black holes. Specifically, that the direction of time could be reversed within them. Several physical procedures are perfectly symmetric in time. Take a pendulum for instance. If someone shows you a video of a pendulum swinging, you cannot differentiate if the video is actually moving forward or backward. But some processes are not symmetric at all. We can tell that a pendulum will ultimately slow because of friction and we know that it was triggered at some point, so we can give a temporal direction to physics. The directionality of time and our view of it was called the “Arrow of Time” by British astronomer Arthur Eddington, and it has been connected to the entropy of the cosmos.

Our understanding of cosmology might need a little tweaking.

Strange light in space could prove to be earth-shattering.

If you believe the creations of science fiction, black holes serve as gateways to other worlds, either distant parts of this universe or other universes entirely. But the reality might be more complicated than that. And outside of the sci-fi realm, dropping into a black hole is a bad idea.

Even so, it turns out that people who enter a black hole would have at least a slight chance of escaping, either back into their own world or to some exotic place. This is because black holes actually bend space itself, and so could bring points that are ordinarily distant from each other much closer together.

An oft-used analogy is the bending of a piece of paper. If you draw a line on the paper, it follows the paper’s shape and the line’s length is unchanged by bending the paper. But if you go through the paper, the end points of the line are much closer to one another. Understanding this requires diving into Einstein’s theory of relativity as applied to gravity. [5 Reasons We May Live in a Multiverse].

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