Could We Find a Door To A Parallel Universe?

p1234 writes "Though no direct evidence for wormholes has been observed, this could be because they are disguised as black holes. Now Alexander Shatskiy of the Lebedev Physical Institute in Moscow, Russia, is suggesting a possible way to tell the two kinds of object apart. His idea assumes the existence of a bizarre substance called "phantom matter", which has been proposed to explain how wormholes might stay open. Phantom matter has negative energy and negative mass, so it creates a repulsive effect that prevents the wormhole closing. 'US expert Dr Lawrence Krauss, from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, points out that the idea rests on untested assumptions. He told New Scientist magazine: "It is an interesting attempt to actually think of what a real signature for a wormhole would be, but it is more hypothetical than observational. Without any idea of what phantom matter is and its possible interactions with light, it is not clear one can provide a general argument."'"

Phantom matter

[PolarBearFire]

"His idea assumes the existence of a bizarre substance called "phantom matter"" I propose this mysterious matter is actually the facial hair from our evil counterparts in the parallel universe.

Phantom Matter == Exotic Matter?

[Anonymous Coward]

Phantom matter? Why invent a new name for something that's already been thought about, called Exotic Matter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exotic_matter/ [wikipedia.org]? Probably should read the article... ;-)

If you're really interested try this book by Kip Thorne:

K.S. Thorne, Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy (W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 1994).

Negative mass is mathematically possible

[Ummite]

Jean-Pierre Petit, ex director of CNRS, made a lot of mathematical proof of the possibility of negative mass and the implication. If interested, please read those explanations.
http://www.jp-petit.org/science/arxiv/publications_recentes.htm [jp-petit.org]
Link to :
Bigravity as an interpretation of cosmic acceleration : http://www.jp-petit.org/science/arxiv/CITV_1_acceleration_english.pdf [jp-petit.org]
Bigravity : A bimetric model of the Universe. Exact nonlinear solutions. Positive and negative gravitational lensings: http://www.jp-petit.org/science/arxiv/CITV_2_exact_solutions_english.pdf [jp-petit.org]

Re:Does any of this matter really matter?

[Anonymous Coward]

Antimatter is real and has been observed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimatter [wikipedia.org]

Re:Most useless press release ever

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks to Hawking radiation, you can.

Re:Sqrt(Negative energy) = head hurts

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't even need to be a physicist for that - being an electrical engineer is enough. Things like imaginary current etc. *do* appear in electrics; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imaginary_part [wikipedia.org] for instance.

We published this already

[Geoffrey.landis]

This is interesting, but looking at the article, i can't see that it's much different from work that we published over a decade back in a paper where we pointed out properties of wormholes, and noted that they might be visible by the signature of the negative effective mass on the bending of light: Natural Wormholes as Gravitational Lenses [arxiv.org], John G. Cramer, Robert L. Forward, Michael S. Morris, Matt Visser, Gregory Benford, Geoffrey A. Landis. U.C. Irvine even wrote a press release about this paper [sff.net], which I've put on my website.

It's a little hard to tell from this very brief article, but what he calls "phantom matter" is what other physicists call "exotic matter" or sometimes "negative matter," which violates one of the positive energy-conditions, and thus has negative energy (in some reference frame). Matt Visser's book Lorentzian Wormholes has a lot more technical details about the various formulations of the positive-energy conditions.

Re:Negative mass is mathematically possible

[Geoffrey.landis]

Jean-Pierre Petit, ex director of CNRS, made a lot of mathematical proof of the possibility of negative mass and the implication.

For reference, Bondi showed that negative mass is not incompativle with General Relativity back in 1957: Bondi, H. "Negative Mass in General Relativity [aps.org]," Reviews of Modern Physics, Vol. 29, No.3, July 1957

Re:Does any of this matter really matter?

[rasputin465]

I had the wonderful opportunity to see a talk by one of the experts of (and I think original proposer of) dark matter.

That's not likely, or if it is true, it's not very relevant. Fritz Zwicky [wikipedia.org] first proposed dark matter (in it's current incarnation) back in the 1930s. However, no one else in the field started to consider this idea until the 1970s (Zwicky died in '74) when other independent bits of evidence started to come in that hinted at dark matter. At that time, people in the field were particularly mindful that the problem could be resolved by either dark matter or by modifying our theories. But as time went on, more and more independent pieces of evidence came in which addressed the same issue. Now, the problem is that if you want to account for each of these observations by modifying our dynamica/gravitational theories, you have to do a different modification in each instance. On the other hand, ALL of these observations are resolved by introducing dark matter. The door was virtually shut on modified theories with the analysis of the Bullet Cluster [wikipedia.org], which simply cannot be explained by modified gravitational theories. And actually, dark matter is not so esoteric; there are many current theories in particle physics that [independently] predict the existence of a particle that would meet the characteristics that we observe and would also be naturally produced in large quantities during the big bang.

Re:Sqrt(Negative energy) = head hurts

[aminorex]

Cayley sedenions are a 16 dimensional field. But zero has divisors in sedenion algebra. Octonion multiplication isn't associative, though. Nor is quaterionion multiplication commutative. It just depends on what characteristics you require for the purpose at hand, really. Froebenius' theorem tells us that only real, complex and quaternionic algebrae are associative division rings over real scalars. But if you only need finite fields (as is often the case in practical applications), an Artinian ring is often iteratively solvable for any given application, of arbitrary dimension.

How many times must one say BUSTED?

[APODNereid]

The state of modern astrophysics is very healthy, thank you.

The conventional theories can't adequately explain why planets appear to frequently have hotspots at their poles.

Er, you do realise, I hope, that the study of planets in our solar system isn't really part of astrophysics? And hasn't been for several decades now? You realise that there's a whole new field of science - planetary science - that studies these phenomena?

There remains no explanation within the conventional theories for why the solar wind continues to accelerate even as it passes the planets.

BUSTED, just a few days ago ... (http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=426528&cid=22208390 [slashdot.org])

I've yet to see any credible attempt to explain why the Deep Impact impactor generated two flashes at the time of impact

Are you perhaps referring to a certain PDF document, that you provided a link to in an earlier comment, purportedly by a (self-declared) physicist (Wallace Thornhill) and David Talbott, purportedly a poster at a 2006 IEEE international conference* (and associated webpages)?

Or perhaps you could provide a link to a reputable source, concerning these "two flashes"?

If we can see elements popping into existence within simple ball lightning laboratory experiments,

... then perhaps a little healthy scepticism and an open mind may be in order? For example, has this result been independently verified? If not, then why not?

What's ultimately really silly about how science operates these days is that there is far too much eagerness to cast aside alternative competing theories that challenge the conventional ones.

One of the great things^ about the contemporary internet is that it's so easy to get things published. Even better is that there are sites which permit publication of physics papers, with far weaker requirements than a relevant peer-reviewed journal has, permitting "alternative competing theories" to get an airing that they otherwise would not. The strong will survive, and go on to become (perhaps) a paper in a good journal, and maybe, just maybe, a Nobel Prize for the author.

But we've been over this, you and I many, many times; if you think you have a framework and method - different from the standard (physics) paradigm you explicitly reject - why not lay it out? Let the world hear of how you think science should really be done!

And by the way, point me to your comet document when it's ready. I'm very eager to see what you come up with!

It's done:
EU rebuttal #(insert large integer here) http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=426528&cid=22196268 [slashdot.org]
actualistic vs prophetic - false dilemma? http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=426528&cid=22204234 [slashdot.org]
So open your brains fall out? http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=426528&cid=22204404 [slashdot.org]
electric comet (1) - "Rules of evidence" http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=426528&cid=22208390 [slashdot.org]
Image copyrights - addendum http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=426528&cid=22208968 [slashdot.org]
EU paradigm - hypothesis on "evidence" http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=426528&cid=22209504 [slashdot.org]
Must accurately reflect source? Not for EU-ers! http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid [slashdot.org]