David M. Rountree  

Based on an article in AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science)Science Magazine, by Ginger Pinholster

Traditionally, physicists have mathematically explained all that happens in the world by using a "standard model." This system is comprised of matter made of lightweight "leptons" (such as electrons and neutrinos) and theoretically quarks. Three of the four forces in the universe manipulate these particles: electromagnetism, and strong and weak nuclear reactions. However, this traditional approach fails to explain gravity, the fourth force. The conventional rules of quantum mechanics have been successfully married with Einstein's Theory of Special Relativity, which explains the behavior of very fast objects, but not with his Theory of General Relativity, the guidebook to gravitational force. Mathematical mush usually results from trying to combine quantum mechanics and general relativity. Consequently, we are still uncertain, for example, as to what happens to particles sucked into a black hole.

In an effort to uniformly explain all events, physicists introduced the concept of an extra dimension, and eventually proposed that it may be curled up like an unimaginably small ball, they said, on the order of the Planck scale, the smallest unit of length in the universe (10 to the minus 33 centimeters). This of course had its moment of popularity and fell silently by the wayside.

The idea of an extra dimension was resurrected yet again in the late 1990s, as scientists began to ask whether Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation reliably predicts gravity's behavior below the centimeter scale, according to Maria Spiropulu, a 32-year-old scientist with the Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago. Since then, Spiropulu reported to AAAS attendees, experiments have shown that Newton's Law is valid down to the 200-micron level. That is, gravity "follows the rules" at that scale. But, the physical reality below this level remains a mystery. Somewhere within the Planck scale, or at extreme energy levels, an incredibly small extra dimension may finally combine gravity and electromagnetism, Spiropulu suggested. Awesome! The Gravoelectromagnetic Dimension!

"We're very close into the energies where we can see effects of a very low-energy Planck scale," she said. "If an extra dimension is mirroring the Planck Scale, that means that gravity and the electromagnetic theory is going to be unified tomorrow." Gravity, Spiropulu said, may soon be unified in an "unexplainable hierarchy of scale."

This is huge!

Alice in Wonderland World

Various scenarios or "frameworks" are emerging to describe a mysterious sister world where, as Alice in Wonderland once remarked, "nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn't." Our three-dimensional world includes the coordinates X, Y, and Z, extending infinitely throughout the universe. But, some researchers have proposed that extra dimensions may be finite, and compacted around a sphere, pole, or other geometrical shape. Others have said that quarks, the standard-model particles, may have "technicolor" cousins in another realm. Or, quarks and neutrinos may exist in a mirror-world, as "squarks" and "sneutrinos."

To learn more about what's happening at the very small scale, Maria Spiropulu, and her colleagues are staging high-energy particle collisions. Extra dimensions, she explained, would leave behind a "signature," and she hopes to detect it.

The classic signature might be a graviton, the carrier of gravity-capable, perhaps, of trickling to another dimension. In her experiments, protons (the hydrogen nucleus is a proton) going at almost the speed of light smash head-on into anti-protons. "What comes out," she said, "is a graviton, escaping into an extra dimension, and leaving a viable signature in your detector."

In particle collisions, the conservation of energy and momentum can be measured, so that what goes into the initial experiment must jive with what's left over, post crash-test. "If it doesn't add up and you have significant imbalance," she explained, "that is a viable signal that there is an extra dimension where, if these theories are valid, gravity may become very strong, and other weird properties might kick in. The idea is that there may be a form of super-gravity in the extra dimension."

Spiropulu shared the latest experimental findings at the AAAS meeting, including a completely new, and what she described as "totally innovative strategy" worked out by Harvard's Nima Arkani-Hamed and others for "dynamically generating an extra dimension and then testing it," rather than the opposite, more conventional strategy: Searching for proof of an assumed extra dimension.

Can this be a possible realm for the paranormal? You Bet it can!

"We're looking at some really neat, new ideas," she concluded.

A team of theoretical and experimental physicists, with participants from Case Western Reserve University, have designed a new black hole simulator called BlackMax to search for evidence that extra dimensions might exist in the universe.

Black holes are theorized to be regions in space where the gravitational field is so strong that nothing can escape its pull after crossing what is called the event horizon. BlackMax simulates these regions.

Approximately two years in the making, the computer program enables physicists to test theories about the production and decay of black holes and takes into account new types of effects on both the creation and evaporation of black holes at the new Large Hadron Collider (LHC) currently being commissioned at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland.

For example, black holes created at the LHC would be expected to start off spinning.

The spinning of the black hole increases the fraction of the black hole's mass that is dissipated as gravitons, elementary quanta of gravity, which could be used to provide a clue to the existence and structure of extra dimensions. Black holes are being studied with BlackMax by members of the ATLAS Experiment at LHC, one of the two principal large particle detectors at the new collider. Case Western Reserve physicists working with Glenn Starkman on the project are his former doctoral student Dejan Stojkovic, now a visiting professor on the faculty of the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo, and De-Chang Dai, who recently graduated with his doctoral degree in physics, and is now a postdoctoral fellow working with Stojkovic. Other collaborators are experimental physicists Cigdem Issever and Jeff Tseng of Oxford University and Eram Rizvi from Queen Mary College at the University of London.

ATLAS works much like investigators who search the site of plane crash, and then piece together the debris to find the cause of the plane's disintegration.

BlackMax, by predicting how those pieces will fall, should allow physicists looking at data from the ATLAS experiment to see whether the pattern of particles released into the detector matches what one would expect when a black hole is produced and then falls apart.

The ordinary non-gravitational collisions predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics tend to produce fragments of the proton clumped into a small number of jets.

Decays of black holes should produce more particles than usual. These particles should also come out unusually isotropically—in every direction—and the mix of particles should be more democratic - including for example electrons and similar particles that are not found within the proton.

Under certain circumstances, black hole decay should also produce many gravitons that would themselves pass unnoticed out of the ATLAS, but which would make the remaining emitted particles looking asymmetric and carrying less than the full event energy.

Starkman said that if black holes are found at the LHC it will enable scientists to understand the connection between gravity and quantum mechanics, resolving the inconsistency between two of the great intellectual triumphs of the 20th century - quantum mechanics and Einstein's General Theory of Relativity.

It would also mean the existence of other dimensions to space, and explain why gravity is such a weak force compared to the other three fundamental forces of nature–electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces.

Or possibly where EVPs orginate from...

According to Starkman, the black holes under study at LHC will be very small, extremely hot at more than billion times the temperature of the sun, and their lifespan will consequently be so short that they will decay within tiny fractions of a second of their creation.

He added that there is not enough time for the black hole to cross a human hair, "never mind leaving the detector," he said.

"What's more important is that the universe has been doing this experiment for billions of years by bombarding the earth's atmosphere (not to mention all the myriad stars) with cosmic rays. So we know if black holes are made at the LHC, they are entirely safe," said Starkman.

Very interesting!